Light it Up
Yesterday, we posed this conundrum: There are two ropes that both take exactly one hour to burn from end to end. You are unable to cut the rope. How can you burn the two ropes in a total of 45 minutes? Porter & Hedges' George Craft came up with the simple answer we were looking for, start one rope on fire from each end and the other from one end. The first will be completely burned in half an hour and the other will be half burned. Light the remaining one from the other end and it will be burned in 15 minutes for a total of 45 minutes. Sperry Van Ness' Altaf Akbari came up with another solution (and created this diagram to express it): Lay out each rope in a circle, with one-quarter of each circumference overlapping. Light the fire at the intersecting point, and they'll burn simultaneously in both directions. (It works in an X too.) Both gents win tickets to Bisnow's Future of Westchase.
