A rectangular room measures 30 feet in length and 12 feet in height, and the ends are 12 feet in width. A spider, rests at a point one foot down from the ceiling at the middle of one end. A fly (food of food to the former) is located one foot up from the floor at the middle of the other end.
The OLD problem, as above, published in various math challenge books, and I see repeated here, as it probably will be again and again years from now, is to find the minimum distance between the spider and the fly, accomplished by "unfolding" the room and computing the pythagorean distance.
What will would probably be MUCH more of a challenge is to determine if the spider CONTINUES on the same direction, (an after dinner walk? :-) ), straight with respect to the "unfolding" of the walls, until (and if?) it EVER returns to its starting position, and if so, how far does the spider travel. Is there an analytic way to do this (preferred), or as an initial answer one could write a computr program?
2006-08-18
08:15:01
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4 answers
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asked by
rhino9joe
5
in
Mathematics