My apple core puzzle in December seemed to go down well with our mathematical-minded audience so I’m planning on putting up a monthly puzzle. This month’s puzzle will challenge your problem solving skills…
Trouble in the server room
Here at Red Gate central we have a pretty simply layout for our server room. The 9 servers are laid out on the floor in a square. To ensure smooth running of the servers we built a robot to collect critical performance information. The robot can only travel in straight lines and we need it to visit every server on the floor plan. Sadly the software in the robot is not working well and has the following problem – it can only change direction 3 times.
Can you work out how to get the robot to visit all the servers, turning only 3 times? Post your comments below.
Note: the Robot must move over each server and remain within the room as shown in the example below.
3 Comments
LosBigos
07/02/2012
| \ /
O O O
| X
O O O
| / \
O---O---O--
Faisal
08/02/2012
That's very easy, go in the Straight line shown will make one turn and then straight line at the end will make the second turn and the third turn will bring the robot at the start of the third row, that's all or am i missing some thing?
All Things Oracle
08/02/2012
Thank you for your answers.
@LosBigos: you are correct, but unfortunately your solution isn't displaying correctly at this time.
@Faisal: the method you describe would need 4 turns to cover all of the servers.
As a few people pointed out on Twitter, the solution requires some thinking outside of the box...
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