The Dumbells Soup Company makes its own cylindrical tin cans. The cans have a diameter of 3 inches and they are 3.5 inches tall.

Dumbells produces the cans by cutting out circles and rectangles from a large sheet of tin. The "wasted tin" between circles and rectangles that they cut out is thrown away. The company can order sheets of arbitrary length, but they are always 6 feet wide.

The operations manager just received an order for 100 cans. He should order the shortest length sheet of tin he can, because he is tasked with minimizing the wasted tin.

What length should the manager order?

(In reply to re: What sized rectangles? by owl)

Actually, that's a very good point. Though the puzzle says "the wasted tin between the circles and the rectangles is thrown out," it would seem that the puzzle ought to allow, say, wasted tin at the border to be used in piecing together new rectangles.

I also think that your triangular idea was a good one. The puzzle's specifications that one can only cut out circles and rectangles seems to me unnecessarily restrictive.

Anyway, I'm not going to try to better CeeAnne's attempt, so I leave that to the clever people out there. 

Edited on November 13, 2004, 8:06 am

Posted by Sam on 2004-11-13 08:06:17