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Well it’s better than petrol stations in London

Someone asked me an interesting question today. When I say interesting, I mean interesting if you are a code monkey, have an inquisitive mind or OCD (I fall into all three categories). Imagine there is a car park which is 100 stories high. You have a bag of marbles and want to know what is the highest level that you can drop a marble from and have it not smash. Assuming a worse case scenario and an optimum algorithm, what is the minimum number of marbles you would need?

I will post my method and answer later this week and who knows, we may even get the Mythbusters to test it out!

Disclaimer: There is little no chance of Adam and Jamie testing my method out. To quote Keith Barret, “it’s a bit of fun”, so enjoy – but no hurting marbles.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 12:16 PM and is filed under Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Well it’s better than petrol stations in London”

  1. Gruntfuggly says:
    April 24, 2008 at 1:32 PM

    7.

  2. JoJo says:
    April 24, 2008 at 2:03 PM

    I’m sure Sarah would tell you that there are marks available for your working out!

  3. Chris says:
    April 25, 2008 at 9:05 AM

    50
    25
    13
    7
    4
    2
    1

    Yes 7. Binary search my arse.

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