Escape From Alcatraz
Imagine a classroom that has 5 meters between its walls in length. Tie a 6-meter long rope between these walls. Let the rope be 2 cm high off the ground. Since the rope strained to its limits, its 1-meter long part hangs from either side of the rope.
The ultimate goal is to escape from the classroom from under this rope, without touching the rope.
Rules
- Escape should be from the middle point of the rope.
- One should use the extra part of the rope to extend it.
- One of the students will help you during the escape. He/she will strain the rope for you so that you can avoid touching the rope.
- Each student has exactly one try for his/her escape.
Winning Condition: Using the least amount of rope for your escape.
Football Field
Legal-size for a football field is between 90 and 120 meters in length. Assume that we strain a rope on a football field that is 100 meters long. We fixed this rope right in the middle of both goals while the rope is touching the pitch.
The middle of the rope sits right on the starting point of the field. This is also known as the kick-off point.
Let us add 1 meter to the existing rope. Now, the rope sits flexed, not strained, on the field.
Question: If we try to pick the rope up at the kick-off point, how high will the rope go?
Solution
We can express the question also as follows:
“Two ropes which have length 100m and 101m are tied between two points sitting 100m apart from each other. One picks the 101m-long rope up from its middle point. How high the rope can go?”
If we examine the situation carefully, we can realize that there are two equal right-angled triangles in the drawing:
Using Pythagorean Theorem, we can find the length h:
(50,5)2 = 502 + h2
h ≈ 7,089 meters.
Conclusion
Adding only 1 meter to a 100-meter long rope helps the rope to go as high as 7 meters in its middle point. This means that a 1-meter addition could let an 18-wheeler truck pass under the rope with ease.
M. Serkan Kalaycıoğlu
kmatematikatolyesi.com 