Kess wrote:
You know, I was just thinking...
...this would be a much tougher LC if you had to figure out how long it would take him to come up with every possible permutation by randomly pulling pieces out of a bag. The solution would be a much huger number.
The question assumes that he won't set up the board the same way more than once, but he's not a very smart pirate anyway, is he? The odds of getting any *one* specific possible permutaion of the board by randomly pulling pieces out of a bag is pretty dang small. At 30 seconds per try, he'd be setting up his board for a very very long time.
suppose its a small board with 4 squares.
He could pull and "board" with 1/16 chance (assuming infinte number of each pecie). But a lucky piarte might pull 16 differnt boards in 64 total pullings while an unlucky one might try 50 differnt boards and have only gotten WWWW(hes the same guy who is still playing burried treasure for the avatar).
And weewoman. Considering the answer is 21 digits long, that means id have taken you and least 100,000,000,000,000,000(thats 100 quadrillion, or 1000 times a hundred trillion) years
. It have been well longer than the rest of your life. Even if a robot could work 1000000 times faster than this dude = youd need at least 1,000,000,000(one billion) of them just to be done in 100 years.