Here’s a puzzle I read in A Beautiful Mind — wow, is the movie a lie! — as expressed at The Ultimate Puzzle Site:

Consider a road with two cars, at a distance of 100 kilometers, driving towards each other. The left car drives at a speed of forty kilometers per hour and the right car at a speed of sixty kilometers per hour. A bird starts at the same location as the right car and flies at a speed of 80 kilometers per hour. When it reaches the left car it turns its direction, and when it reaches the right car it turns its direction again to the opposite, etcetera.

The question is: How far does the bird fly?

I’m going to give you two hints:

FIRST HINT: If you’re filling up a page with complex formulae, you’re going wrong.

Scroll down for the next spoiler. (This is for those of you readi1ng this as an RSS feed.)     

SECOND HINT: Select between the X’s to see the hint:
X     The two cars are an hour apart     X

Scroll down for solution.    

SOLUTION: Select between the X’s to see the answer:
X The cars take an hour to reach each other. That’s supposed to be the easy part. That means the bird is flying for an hour at 80km/hour. Hence, the bird flies 80km. X

No, I didn’t get the answer. [Technorati tag: puzzle]

Categories: Uncategorized dw