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30 January 2007

PizzaQ 2nd Notice: u got 68 days to solve the Easter Bunny Faberge Egg Distribution Problem. u can do this.

Click the map with the Easter Bunny.
Click the table of number pairs.

Here comes Peter Cottontail,
Hoppin' down the bunny trail,
Hippity, hoppity, Easter's on its way!

Bringin' every girl and boy
Baskets full of Easter joy,
Things to make your Easter bright and gay!

He's got jelly beans for Tommy,
Colored eggs for sister Sue,
There's an orchid for your Mommy
And an Easter bonnet, too.

Oh! here comes Peter Cottontail,
Hoppin' down the bunny trail,
Hippity hoppity, Happy Easter day.

Here comes Peter Cottontail,
Hoppin' down the bunny trail,
Look at him stop, and listen to him say:

"Try to do the things you should."
Maybe if you're extra good,
He'll roll lots of Easter eggs your way.

You'll wake up on Easter morning
And you'll know that he was there
When you find those choc'late bunnies
That he's hiding ev'rywhere.

Oh! here comes Peter Cottontail,
Hoppin' down the bunny trail,
Hippity hoppity, Happy Easter day!

Okay, now look
-- are we at this pathetic moment again, where Vleeptron asks A Very Simple PizzaQuestion, but NOBODY on the entire Internet can answer it?

All Vleeptron wants is The Shortest Path for the Easter Bunny to come from Easter Bunny Centre, deliver a fabulous bejewelled Faberge Easter Egg to 13 little girls and boys, and then go home again to Easter Bunny Centre.

ramanuJohn solved a similar Path-Finding Problem for Santa Claus to deliver toys to the homes of 7 little girls and boys.

So surely SOMEBODY can help the Easter Bunny find the Shortest Path in time for Easter Sunday. You have 68 days (see calendar).

Here's the deal:

1. The Earth is Flat.

2. The Easter Bunny's map is a standard piece of Cartesian x-y graph paper. Distances are in kilometers.

3. Easter Bunny Centre is at the origin: x = 0 and y = 0

4. Each child lives at an ordered pair (x, y)

5. The Easter Bunny always hops between one place and the next in a straight line.

6. Starting at Easter Bunny Centre, the Easter Bunny visits each child just once, and then returns to Easter Bunny Centre.

By an amazing coincidence, each child's name starts with one of the first 13 letters of the alphabet. Small e stands for Easter Bunny Centre. So an example path will look like this:

eABCDEFGHIJKLMe

or

eIDLBGAFJKMCHEe

and if you think that's the Shortest Possible Path, you also have to give its length, like

76543.21 Kilometers

Just work it out to 2 decimal places of precision.

You can do this. SOMEBODY out there can do this. It's just not possible that NOBODY attached to the World Wide Web has the brains to do this. That would be like totally pathetic. The whole Internet and C-Space and the entire Blogosphere would just have to be so ashamed.

Oh, I forgot. The Ministry of Pizza is giving away 1 Large Pizza with your choice of 4 toppings (transportation and shipping not included). Anchovies. Pineapple. Wurst. Whatever.

Make Vleeptron proud. Make your mom proud. Make your dad proud. Make your Significant Other all excited and hot and in awe of you, make that person your Drooling Love Slave forever.

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