The Cannibals of an Island have the habit of eating each other.
One evening, the cannibals threw a dinner party. Six cannibals turned up and they decided to eat each other in turn. So someone was selected for everyone to eat (except the victim!), and when he had been eaten, someone else was selected, and so on.
If it took one cannibal two hours on his own to devour one person, how long was it before just one consumer remained?

i first tried to solve the problem the same way as penny where in the first 'course' of the meal, 5 ate 1 (which took 24 mins), in the second, 4 ate 1 (taking 30 mins) etc until the last two remained in course 5. this round took 2 hours, and the total came to 4 hours 34 mins. After seeing that this is not the solution, I considered that the semantics of the word 'consumer' may be in question. In the 5th course, where 2 people remain, only one of them is technically a consumer. This means that, on these grounds, the time taken for course 5 is additional to the time taken to leave one consumer, and hence only 2 hours 34 minutes is required.
Thoughts?

Posted by tim on 2004-02-05 11:04:43