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Tiptoe through Time (Posted on 2005-10-11) Difficulty: 2 of 5
If traveling through a white circle takes that many minutes, and black circles represent backwards jumps in time that save 5 minutes, what's the shortest trip through this map?

From the spanish MENSA site.

See The Solution Submitted by Old Original Oskar!    
Rating: 2.5714 (7 votes)

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re: try this | Comment 6 of 8 |
(In reply to try this by Goldwing)

Well, just because it's a mensa problem doesn't say much about its difficulty.  In my experience, mensa puzzles aren't always good quality, though that's just my personal opinion.



For kicks, my solution:

Since all arrows point right or up, we can separate the map into 9 diagonals.  We must always move from diagonal 1 to diagonal 2 to 3, etc.  Every even numbered diagonal, no matter where we land, we go back 5 minutes.  Therefore, I will ignore these rows until it comes to final calculations.  Similarly, in all other diagonals, I will scale down the numbers so that the lowest number in each is 0.  For example, diagonal 3 would have numbers 2, 0, and 1.

  0
201
05300
034
0

If you at all follow what I am doing (it went a lot faster in my mind than in this explanation), you know that I want to get from the top 0 to the bottom 0 while minimizing the sum of the numbers I pass.  The solution pretty clearly goes 0+2+0+0+0 = 2.

For final calculations, I add in all the minutes that I had first subtracted, and also go back in time a total of 20 minutes.  The total comes to 41 minutes.


  Posted by Tristan on 2005-10-12 04:20:36
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