/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.5537212]

You have a cookie. You eat half of it. You eat half of what's left. How many times will you halve the cookie until there's nothing left of it?

[Anonymous No.5537219]

>>5537212
you can say that its 1/(2^x) so mathematicly you have to eat an infinit number of times. but i think if its an hard cookie you can only divide it around 3 or 4 times

[Anonymous No.5537225]

the number of atoms divided by 2

[Anonymous No.5537232]

the answer is this
<span class="math"> \Sigma_{n=- \infty}^{n=0}\frac{1}{2^n}=-2[/spoiler]
So you need to half the biscuit negative 2 times

[Anonymous No.5537240]

>>5537225
You forgot leptons and nucleons... And quarks...

[Anonymous No.5537242]

>>5537232
but if you do that you would have 4 cookies?
(1/2)^-2 = 1/(1/4) = 4

[Anonymous No.5537248]

>>5537212
You'll always have half of what you had, your cookie will last forever - which makes it a very special cookie. Can I have the recipe?

[Anonymous No.5537269]

>>5537212

Bitches don't know about my asymptotes.

[Anonymous No.5537271]

[Anonymous No.5537273]

it depends if it's a real cookie or a metaphysical cookie.

If it's a real cookie then obviously after eating half of it, and then half the other half, you just pop the rest of it in your mouth.
If it's a metaphysical cookie, then the answer is infinity. You half it forever. It's the same as Zeno's paradox. Achilles never catches up with the tortoise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno's_paradoxes

[Anonymous No.5537278]

>>5537232

at last I see!

[Anonymous No.5537281]

>>5537212
you will eat only 1 time, you can't eat just half of a cookie

[Anonymous No.5537286]

Not sure, but as soon as you got down to a Planck Unit square you'd have to eat the last bit whole.
It's around 1.6 × 10−35 by 1.6 × 10−35

[Anonymous No.5537289]

>>5537281
see >>5537271
does not eat whole cookie at once
your hypothesis has been falsified

[Schaiffe !zribfvVT8o No.5537295]

>>5537286
It would not go that far.
You would go until there are 2 or 3 atoms left.

To half it after that, you would have to split an atom.

[Schaiffe !zribfvVT8o No.5537296]

>>5537295
I meant 1 or 3.

Come to think of it, any odd number of atoms, really. (If splitting exactly in half)

[Anonymous No.5537328]

>>5537286
<span class="math">m^2[/spoiler]

[Anonymous No.5537332]

>>5537212
>Implying we know all the particles around

[Anonymous No.5537338]

a typical cookies consists of 1 mole of poisonium:

2^n=6.02e23
n=ln(6.02e23)/ln(2)
n=79

solved?

[Anonymous No.5537383]

>>5537296
>tfw cookie had an odd number of atoms from the beginning

[Anonymous No.5537389]

>>5537273
I think you dont actually know what metaphysical means

[Anonymous No.5537396]

>>5537389
>>5537273
is one cookie cut in 2 pieces - one remaining, second eaten, digested and shat out still a same cookie in ontological meaning?

[Anonymous No.5537395]

>>5537240
>Eating half of 3 quarks
I seriously hope you guys don't do this

[Anonymous No.5537398]

>>5537396
You seem to have a very loose definition of what counts as "cookie"

[Anonymous No.5537408]

>>5537398
Yeah, cookie isn't well defined.

[Anonymous No.5537411]

>>5537408
At the very least it's a baked form of food which poop isn't

[Anonymous No.5537418]

>>5537212
How many molecules of cookie are there? If this doesn't come into play it's infinite amounts of half cookie eating.

[Anonymous No.5537424]

>>5537418
When does the cookie stop being a cookie?
Do you need to preserve the ratio of ingredients?
Since there is not cookie molecule there should be a line that decides when a piece of cookie is no longer a cookie.

[Anonymous No.5537433]

>>5537424
>since there is not a cookie molecule

[Anonymous No.5537484]

>>5537433
Maybe it's time science creates a molecule for cookies, not sure how advantageous it would be but if we made blue bananas then why not this?

[Anonymous No.5537508]

>>5537408
Maybe we should be thinking in terms of fuzzy sets. Binary Logic? Pah

[Anonymous No.5537527]

>>5537212
Assuming the cookie weighs 20g and is made entirely of carbon-12 (I know there's some hydrogen and oxygen, it averages to being about 12 per atom probably)

20g is 20*6*10^23/12 atoms, or 1.004 × 10^24 which rounds pretty nicely to 10^24.

assuming you consume half the atoms in the cookie with each bite, rounding up if there are an odd number of atoms, the answer is x where 10^24 / 2^x <.5

The first number for which that is true is 81, so you would need to take 81 bites to consume the cookie. Last ones would probably be pretty small.

Of course if you round down then you can never eat the cookie, because you'll always have 1 atom left. And if you try and split the last atom (meh, why not) it'll probably give you two lithium isotopes, which then give you a hydrogen and helium isotope, which then give you baryons, which are made of quark triplets and when you try and separate them, the energy you need is transformed into 2 new quarks so then it really is impossible to eat the whole cookie.

[Gargarn No.5537529]

Is imposible, you can never eat all the cookie, because this problem it´s an asymtote bitch!

[Anonymous No.5537532]

>>5537529
Only cookies are made of discrete particles. It's not possible, but not because of an an asymptote.