xkcd #3125: Snake-in-the-Box Problem
Title text:
Chemistry grad students have been spotted trying to lure campus squirrels into laundry hampers in the hope that it sparks inspiration.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3125/
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What about goats in circular pens? A goat is tied to the fence of a circular pen. How long does the rope need to be so that the goat can reach exactly half of the pen’s area? What sounds like a high school math problem was eventually solved in 2020 via complex analysis.
Here’s the answer:
What’s really neat about this problem is that the 3D example, a bird in a cage, was solved sooner and is much simpler
Randall forgot psychology, which has involved a ton of putting animals in boxes…
Also zoology
In computer science, you steal the box from the psych department and put children in it so you can sell them loot crates
I guess a key thought experiment doesn’t qualify as a reason, and also we are supposed to conveniently forget about putting spherical cows in a vacuum just because.
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Either I’m misunderstanding the problem or a length of 8 is possible.
Edit: found my mistake, far left edge has two non-consecutive segments on adjacent corners. Leaving this up in case anyone else tries for a better score.
10?
Your snake has two heads.
Also, one of them shares an edge with the tail.
I’d expect something around ~200 for n=9 and ~400 for n=10, but I imagine this is too big to be brute forced by raw computing
Some lower bounds have been established: https://oeis.org/A099155
