Four Pins and a Rubber Band (Posted on 2005-02-10)

	Submitted by David Shin
Rating: 4.1000 (10 votes)
Solution:	(Hide)
The answer is 11/36. This is actually a special case of Sylvester's Four Point Problem, whose solution is outlined in the following website: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/SylvestersFour-PointProblem.html When I submitted this problem, I did so without actually having computed an answer, though I figured it would not be overly complicated to compute. The above website indicates that the computation is an in fact an extremely difficult one; if I had known this previously, I would not have submitted the problem on perplexus. My apologies.

	Subject	Author	Date
	Answer	K Sengupta	2008-03-03 11:02:36
	Numerical solution	Bob Smith	2005-06-15 21:07:38
	re: i ve got it	chris	2005-02-26 06:28:05
	re: about the solution	Steve Herman	2005-02-20 21:05:12
	about the solution	Charlie	2005-02-20 16:35:28
	i ve got it	Clara Levy	2005-02-18 19:57:17
	Suggestion	Angela	2005-02-15 11:43:23
	Spoiler -- I concede	Steve Herman	2005-02-12 14:00:03
	formal solution	ronen	2005-02-12 11:31:06
	re: thoughts--and a simulation	Steve Herman	2005-02-11 18:00:39
	thoughts--and a simulation	Charlie	2005-02-10 18:07:01