Solution to February's Puzzle: Piece of Cake
In last month's puzzle, you had a rectangle-shaped frosted cake, with a rectangleshaped hole in it in an arbitrary position.Your challenge was to make one straight cut so that you end up with two equally sized portions of cake, each with the same amount of frosting.
Any straight line that goes through the center of a rectangle splits it into equal pieces, regardless of angle. So, you first mark the center of the cake. Then, you mark the center of the hole. You can now use your knife to cut a straight line that goes through both the center of the cake and the center of the hole, as Figure A shows. With this cut, you split the cake into two equal pieces that have the same amount of frosting.
March's Puzzle: Cards Facing Up
Thanks to SQL Server Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Steve Kass for this month's card-themed puzzle.You have a deck of 52 cards, all facing down. Blindfolded, you turn over seven of the cards in the deck so that they face up, then you shuffle the entire deck. Remaining blindfolded, you now need to separate the cards into two piles so that each pile contains the same number of face-up cards. Hint: The number of cards in each pile doesn't need to be the same—just the number of cards facing up.