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[3 marks]

Alice and Bob are having lunch. Alice has five apples and Bob has three. Alice gives two to Bob, who eats four. Charlie is 8 minutes late for his train.

Calculate the mass of the sun (in kg).

Note: Submissions for this puzzle are rate-limited to once per hour. Next submission time is Sat Nov 23 08:23:13 2024

Solution

author: diffuse

This puzzle was more of a mindgame. You have only 24 chances during the puzzlehunt, assuming you make use of every 1 hour window.

We are presented with a standard physics problem, some simple information about Alice, Bob and Charlie from which we (supposedly) must calculate the mass of the sun. Of course, since this is a computer-based exam and the use of Google is always permitted (and encouraged) in the puzzlehunt, we may just google the answer and paste it in. Well, almost -- due to the large number of possible formats, only a few were accepted:

1.989e30
1.989e+30
1.989*10^30
1.989*10^+30
1989000000000000000000000000000

Whitespace in sensible places was also allowed, as were extra zeros, and (most) mathematically correct variants of the above. A tolerance of 1% was also accepted. Unfortunately it seems one team were denied their (correct) solution due to using the form 1.989x10^30 instead. (The use of x or × is now accepted.)