Achim Schneider <barsoap@web.de> writes:
Jon Fairbairn <jon.fairbairn@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
Adrian Neumann <aneumann@inf.fu-berlin.de> writes:
I often wonder how many cuts you need to divide a steak in n pieces. You can obviously get n pieces with (sqrt n) cuts by cutting a grid. But I'm sure some smart mathematician thought of a (log n) way.
Are you allowed to move the pieces between cuts?
Later you're also going to demand to bend it in N dimensions, aren't you?
I don't know about you, but I demand that my steaks have at least four dimensions (in particular they should be much larger in the fourth than an éclair), but as to bending, no, to get to log n you wouldn't need that. If you allow it to be arbitrarily bendable, you can do it in one cut, except that I imagine there's an unstated requirement that all (map ((<size mouth) . size) pieces) and I'm not sure you can manage that with one straight cut. -- Jón Fairbairn Jon.Fairbairn@cl.cam.ac.uk