Reply To: Sunday Puzzle thread
Fun thing about this week’s bridge and torch puzzle, it’s easy to see that you can in fact get the people across in 15 mins, but we can also model it as a graph where the possible state (which person is on which side) becomes a node, and valid movement as an edge between the nodes, with the time it takes to cross as the weights. Then, the whole thing becomes a shortest-path problem which can be solved using something like Dijkstra’s or A*.
The good thing about generalising it is that we can now have any number of people with any crossing times, which is pretty cool!