there is two countries A and B, the distance between them is 1200 km.
there is a company in country A wants to transport some goods to country B, so the company decided to hire a number of planes, each plane has a tank with Capacity 60 Liters initially all tanks are full of fuel, one liter of fuel can transport a plane only 10km.
unfortunately, a plane with full tank can fly 600km which is not enough to travel to country B.
a plane can be used to help another plane with fuel , if two planes are in the same point one plane can transfer any number of liters of fuel from its tank to the other plane's tank while they are in air ,take care that all planes must back safety to airport in country A before their tanks is empty, expect one plane should travel to country B.
help the company to find a strategy that transport goods to country B using minimum number of planes since hiring a plane is too expensive.
notes:
1- a plane cannot be used more that once so when a plane back to airport in country A cannot be used again.
2- one plane is enough to hold all goods so only one plane should arrive to country B.
3- if plane2 wants to transfer fuel to plane1 , both plane1 and plane2 need to be in the same distance from country A .
4- tank of a plane cannot hold more than 60 liter at any time
Answer is 3 .
try to divide whole circle at r/6 if r is radius.
impossible to do it using 3 planes, maybe my english is very bad.
the plane that transport good don't need to back to country A but the other planes that help with fuel should back to country A .
if you are sure ,can you tell the details of your solution?
If a plane transfer fuels to another plane at distance x from country A, then the maximum fuel it can transfer is 60 - (2 / 10) * x, and the plane that gets to country B needs an additional 60 liters of fuel. So, if the planes must leave country A before transferring fuel to another plane, then the answer is 3. Otherwise, the answer is just 2.
if plane2 wants to transfer fuel to plane1 , both plane1 and plane2 need to be in the same distance from country A
in addition, tank of a plane cannot hold more than 60 liter at any time ,so tank of plane that will travel to B will overflow
Ahhhhhhh, you're right. I hadn't considered that the fuel of a plane can't exceed 60 liters at any time...
For the sake of simplicity, let's change the problem statement so that the planes can hold up to 600 liters and each liter allows a plane to travel 1 km.
Now, let's consider the following plan:
At any step, the planes are at distance d from country A, and they travel x kms before transferring T units of fuel to another plane. Furthermore, we want half of the remaining planes to have a full tank after the transfers, so T = x, and the other planes must return to country A, so 2d + x + T < = 600, then the maximum value x can take is obtained by the following equation: 2x + d + T = 3x + d = 600 => x = (600 - d) / 3.
Now, let's simulate the process and see what that yields for each step...
As we can see, the position of the planes with full tanks will tend to 600, but never reach it, so from this analysis, we could assume that it's impossible to reach country B, but... with a little more careful analysis and this procedure in mind, we can arrive to the following solution...
14 planes have been used in this solution. Maybe there's a better one, I'd like to know.
that exactly my solution , I also wanted if there is a better solution.
the main idea that the best partition of the way from A to B is to divide it to 6 parts
thank you anyway :)
Well it's not possible to do with any ammount of planes. Unless you can put a plane inside in a plane. If it is possible, would you explain how to do it with 100 planes?
statment of problem didn't mention that you can put a plane inside another plane, however there exist a solution.
If I understood the problem correctly, I can do it using 16 planes (our plane with goodies and 15 additional planes).
Using this sequence we can transport one plane to the distance of 400 km with 60 liters of fuel, using 4 additional planes, which will return to country A at the end. Fuel transfers are colored.
Then we can transport 3 planes using this sequence and finish like this:
PS Sorry for my bad English.
You can improve your solution to become using only 14 planes , you don't need 3 planes to arrive to x=400 with full tanks it's enough for the third plane to hold 40 liters when arriving to x=400.
As I said in a reply earlier, I arrived to this solution, which might not be optimal.
14 planes have been used in this solution. Maybe there's a better one, I'd like to know.