An Enormous Chocolate Bar
Geoff has bought a Jumbo Chocolate Bar from a shop today. The size of this bar is 2 blocks by 1009 blocks. He decides that he wants to break the bar up into individual blocks.
Given that he can split only one chocolate piece into smaller pieces at a time, what is the minimum number of splits are required to break the bar up into individual blocks?
The answer is 2017.
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1 solution
Notice that each split increases the number of pieces of chocolate by 1. Since we start at 1 piece and end with 2 × 1 0 0 9 = 2 0 1 8 pieces, we must require 2017 splits to break the bar down, and any method of splitting will be able to do this successfully in the 2017 splits.