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Monday, January 28, 2008

Hobos and Cigars

A certain hobo can make cigars from discarded cigar butts. He finds that with 5 cigar butts he can make one whole cigar.

One month he collects 25 butts. How many cigars can he make?

13 comments:

Unknown said...

He can make 6 - 5 to start with, but after those are used, he'll have 5 more butts.

Anonymous said...

Dave,
Are you high? If your theory holds, then the hobo would never run out of butts to make cigars out of. The implicit message here is that the hobo-made cigars can only be smoked once. Therefore, he can make only 5 cigars.

Anonymous said...

Actually dave is absolutely right. The implicit message is the hobo-made cigar can be smoked as many times as the rule holds. If not, why would this be an IQ question.

And he will run out of butt as after 6 smoke, he is left with one butt so he can't make anything.

Anonymous said...

Who said that he smoked the cigars? The question only asks how many cigars he can make out of 25 cigarbutts imo.

Anonymous said...

He can make 5 cigars with the 25 cigar butts, but if he uses the 5 cigars, Then he can make another cigar.

Anonymous said...

The hobo can make 5 cigars with the butts

Unknown said...

whoever says 5 is right ok it says he can make a cigar with cigar BUTTS!!!! u dont make a cigar from 5 other cigars ok?? it's 5 and adam is right, it never says if he smokes it, the point is that how many he can make

Anonymous said...

Yes he can make 5.

But if he decides to smoke all 5 the next day, he'll have 5 more butts.

With the 5 butts he can make one more.

6.

Yes the question isn't that specific, but i guess both answers are correct.

Anonymous said...

If you want to go into things that aren't stated in the question than the hobo would be able to make 5 to the fifth power cigars, creating, then detaching and recreating the cigars in its finite amount of different variabilities. 3125 cigars

djkjr said...

5 to the 5th is a good guess, but taking your theory, the answer is staggeringly larger. If you were to take 25 unique items and create 1 cigar as many times as you could, you'll find a very simple statistics question. Since order is not important (and since we can't repeat the numbers, because doing so would imply that one of the cigar butts was duplicatable, which it is not) you get an formula of N!/R!(N-R)! where "N" is the amount of unique items "R" is the amount of items used (5, to create 1 cigar) and "!" is your 'factorial' (the mathematical term for creating an amount of different possibilities) you get a grand total of 53130. That's assuming you only produce 1 cigar at a time, and since the idea of what is NOT being said is being embellished here, we find ourselves with thousands of different cigars, not just 5 or 6.

Anonymous said...

i am smart!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Unknown said...

the REAL answer is 6 cigar because
1cigar=5butts and there are 25 butts but then he smokes the five cigars he make with the 25 butts that he had now he has another 5 butts which is anothe cigar so the answer is 6 cigars

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.