I am indebted to my colleague Jean Standing for proposing this problem, which I hope I solved despite dropping a clanger on the way (older
readers will see the soup connection there). Jean thought it should
require only school level maths and I agree, but it does not correspond
to the standard formulae worked out, so may be worth adding to the
repertoire.
A supermarket has a promotion on soup, buy 2 tins and get 1 free. There
are 30 different flavours of soup. Assuming stocks never run out and the
customer can select soups of the same flavour, how many permutations
are there of choosing three cans of soup?
I'll send my answer to individuals on request.
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The significant date is 17 November 1951, making this Saturday
17 November 2001 the 50th anniversary of ...
the first business application run on an electronic computer (LEO).
The full story is found in IEE Review for September 2001, written up by
David Caminer who was one of the original team. The article stresses the
lengths gone to to ensure that the results were reliable: the data input
was validated by double keying and test jobs were run to confirm the
machine's performance on every run.
It would be appropriate to buy a cake to celebrate.
RAR
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