<p>You employ someone to work for you for seven days. You have one gold bar to pay your employee. Your employee needs to be paid for their days work at the end of each day. How do you pay your employee if you can only cut the gold bar twice?</p>
<p>err oops! my bad</p>
<p>It's actually...</p>
<p>Cut a 4/7 sized piece off the bar. Take the other piece and cut off a third of it.</p>
<p>There you go!</p>
<p>Now we need to pay him LIBOR + 20 basis points in interest because we're forcing him to hold on to the money we pay him from day to day (making it useless for us to pay him daily in the first place) :-(</p>
<p>Why don't we just give the employee a pay cut, since the kind of manual labor that is paid daily obviously isn't worth an entire gold bar. Then we can entire into a credit swap where he is not paid for the first six days and receives 50% of the gold bar at the end (this is much more than he would have been paid, given the pay cut, had he not accepted the agreement to get money only at the end). With our second cut, we slice off 10% and donate it to charity so that we can all go down in history as great Americans. Finally, with the excess 40% we subcontract a runway-sized treadmill and an airplane.</p>
<p>cghen, doesn't that make one 1/7 piece, one 2/7 piece, and one 4/7 piece? How would that pay the worker each day?</p>
<p>Give him 1. Then take it backm and give him 2. Then give him 1. Then take back both, and give him 4. Etc.</p>
<p>I disagree with having the employee hold the gold. I hypothesize that such an act would, in fact, violate a physical law (the conservation of lima beans, perhaps). The employee must be given a certain amount of gold, to keep, each day.</p>
<p>If you cut the bar diagonally in straight lines you can get 4 pieces, but that isn't enough. I propose the use of curved cuts. Follow these steps:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Treat the bar as a rectangle (viewed from overhead) with corners A, B, C, D, where AB is parallel to CD and BC is parallel to AD - thus, the sides are AB, BC, CD, and DA. Define the midpoint of AB as P, and the midpoint of CD as Q.</p></li>
<li><p>Make a cut with a parabolic shape which intersects A and B, and <em>almost</em> intersects Q (but not quite). There are now 2 pieces.</p></li>
<li><p>Make another cut, similarly shaped, which intersects C and D, and <em>almost</em> intersects P (but not quite).</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Now there are five pieces of gold (not necessarily equal, but then again, who's to say that the worker puts in equal effort each day). Pay the employee Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday with the five pieces of gold, and then let the employee have Saturday and Sunday off.</p>
<p>I like cghen and durt's explanation except for one small problem: if the employee needs to be paid every day he may spend part of his gold and not be able to trade in the full amount on the following day. For example, if after the first day he needs to be paid to buy food for his family, how can he trade that 1/7 piece back in for the 2/7 piece on the following day? </p>
<p>You can't have your cake and eat it too.</p>
<p>Edit to add: I got ahead of myself and see that my post echoes perplex's opening thoughts.</p>
<p>Well, my opening thoughts echo River Phoenix's post. lol</p>
<p>Hey, maybe the only reason the worker "must" be paid daily is so he can go home and show it to his irritable wife or some such silly reason... in which case it would be fine to make him hang onto it. A gold bar for a week of physical labor is a pretty nice salary anyway. He shouldn't complain too much!</p>
<p>just think of how heavy his pockets will by by the end of the week! That's the physical labor right there. So it's reasonable to make him hang on to it; he's being paid to.</p>
<p>My initial guess was with perplex. It never stated we had to make straight cuts; I'd make two curved cuts. A parabola and a M sounds good to me, with the parabola intersecting the "M" 4 times. Then we have 7 pieces =]</p>
<p>Well, I thought about bent cuts too, but to make a bent cut you have to physically take the cutting tool out of the gold (at least any cutting tool I've used) and then you are really making too many cuts, right? So, curved cuts.</p>
<p>On the other hand, maybe you cut the gold with a jet of some sort.</p>
<p>a jet on a conveyor belt? this was a much better riddle,..</p>
<p>I meant jets of, say, water (would that work?). Sorry, I completely forgot the prominent role that jets played in that other riddle. lol</p>
<p>If you could make curved cuts then you could just make sinusoids that touched the edges and have as many pieces as you wanted.</p>
<p>But are we allowed to touch the edges? I'll have to think about that.</p>
<p>You could cut sinusoids, or M shapes or curves or whatever, that give you 7 pieces, but the 7 pieces would not be of equal size. You have to pay the guy the same amount everyday</p>