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. -- ____________________________________________________________________ natsugusa ya...tsuwamonodomo ga...yume no ato summer grass...those mighty warriors'...dream-tracks Matsuo Basho The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------
