Nope, some people get stuck on which links to cut. The standard answer is 3, which is the same as yours but with the assumption that you can detatch a link from its neighbours after 1 cut, which wasn’t made explicit.
The thing is, the illustration shows a ring of 12 links, not the 15 asked for. For a 12-link chain you make 3 cuts in the links of one chain and use them to join the others in a ring. That is how I would expect the problem to be formluated. To get a 15-link chain from the 12 links available you have to cut 3 of them in half (6 cuts) in order to get 15 links.
No, actually you can do better if the links are large enough: cut one link with 4 cuts into 4 pieces and use them to join the remaining four chains.
Oh man, that was a stupid typo. I was very confused, mostly because I myself hadn’t properly read the question. Edited now; yours is a clever solution though.
Similar puzzles to this one sometimes allow `out-of-the-box’ thinking, where you use a single cut (as in: cleaving action) to cut vertically through all links in a single chain, producing 6 half-links at once.
Nope, some people get stuck on which links to cut. The standard answer is 3, which is the same as yours but with the assumption that you can detatch a link from its neighbours after 1 cut, which wasn’t made explicit.
The thing is, the illustration shows a ring of 12 links, not the 15 asked for. For a 12-link chain you make 3 cuts in the links of one chain and use them to join the others in a ring. That is how I would expect the problem to be formluated. To get a 15-link chain from the 12 links available you have to cut 3 of them in half (6 cuts) in order to get 15 links.
No, actually you can do better if the links are large enough: cut one link with 4 cuts into 4 pieces and use them to join the remaining four chains.
Oh man, that was a stupid typo. I was very confused, mostly because I myself hadn’t properly read the question. Edited now; yours is a clever solution though.
Similar puzzles to this one sometimes allow `out-of-the-box’ thinking, where you use a single cut (as in: cleaving action) to cut vertically through all links in a single chain, producing 6 half-links at once.