word problem

juicy123

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Jan 3, 2006
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another person is doing the same problem, but i actually took the time to type it out!

That’s Entertainment!

An entertainer has an oridinary deck of playing cards. He gives them to his subject, turns his back, and has her shuffle the deck throughly.

Keeping his back to her so he cant see what shes doing, he then tells her to make some piles according to these instructions.

1.First she turns over the top card of the deck.
If this is a picture card (jack, queen, or king), she puts it back somewhere in the middle of the deck. She keeps going until she gets a card that is not a picture card. That is, she continues until she gets an ace,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, or 10, and places that card face up on the table.

2. Beginning with the number on the card, she starts counting to herself until she gets to 12. (aces are treated as 1) with each count, she takes one card from the top of the deck and places it face up on top of the pile she is creating. When she reaches 12, she turns the pile over so that the card she started with is face down on top.

For example, if she initially turns up an 8, she places a card on top of the 8 and silently counts “10”, then another card on top and sounts “11”, and finally, another card on top and counts “12”. At that point, she turns over the pile, with the 8 face down on top. In this example, the pile would have five cards altogether.

3. Once the pile is complete, she repeats instructions 1 and 2, working with the remaining cards. She keeps creating new piles until she runs out of cards.

If she runs out of cards while trying to complete a pile, she picks up all the cards in that incomplete pile.

The woman follows the instructions. When she is done, the entertainer turns around and asks her to give him the cards from her final, imcomplete pile.

He sees that she has given him 5 cards, but he DOES NOT look to see which cards they are. He ALSO sees that she has made 6 complete piles.
He then tell her to take the top card from each pile and add the numerical values of these cards together, without showing him the cards or telling him the sum.

She does this, and he then tells her the sum she got.
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and then my teacher told me that the easiest way to find the answer is to use a formula. this is the part im stuck on, cause im bad with formulas
 
To the tutors: I think this is one of those group projects that they give the kids weeks to work on. I'm guessing that they were assigned to work on it over the holiday break and, now that their two weeks are up, they're looking for somebody to do it for them.

Considering that this exercise appears to have been composed back in 1980, and that there are very few results in Google that include the solution, I would guess that the IMP-POW people are fairly diligent about getting illicit solutions scrubbed from the web. I'm not inclined to tick them off.

To the student(s): Part of the point of this project is that you work with the numbers and structure long enough that you can develop the formula. Even if we had the formula on hand, just giving it to you would defeat the purpose of the assignment.

Why don't you post what you have done on this? And then maybe we can give you hints on where to go from there, okay?

Eliz.
 
well, for sure i know that the formula has to do with the number of decks she has and the number of cards he has in his hands. I've actually done the card problem many times and i KNOW that there is a pattern there, but cant seem to point it out.
 
So, some examples i got were:

6 stacks sum= 29 entertainer has 3 cards
7 stacks sum= 43 " " 4 cards
8 stacks sum= 57 " " 5 cards
 
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