Science News Online - Past Issues - 5/4/96

Jim Choate ravage at ssz.com
Tue Aug 21 20:25:25 PDT 2001



On Tue, 21 Aug 2001, Tim May wrote:

> On Tuesday, August 21, 2001, at 08:00 PM, Jim Choate wrote:
> 
> > Speaking of splitting the cake, who gets the trim?
> >
> > http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arch/5_4_96/bob1.htm

 
> That's a 5-year-old cite.
> 
> You obviously used a search engine to search for related articles from a 
> post of mine. Have you no shame?

It was the first cite I cam across that mentioned the 'gets so small that
nobody cares' aspect...suited my purposes just dandy. Within that sentence
is another whole aspect of the 'fair n-slice problem', for example; how
does it get small? Consider the situation where you have a cake and
n-people and use a scale to measure the slices. The goal being to get them
all weighing the same <i>within some measure of error</i>. An associated
question is, given a starting quantity (q), a number of players (n), and
a given error (dq), what is the maximum number of 'slice and dices' you
will need to go through? How does that change when it's a fixed percentage
by volume error (ie %g/g)? Or perhaps (as likely with people) a fixed
minimum volume that one can resolve (while this reduces for homogenious
quantities, what happens when it's heterogenous)? From a applications
perspective this seems like a pretty important issue.


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