Saturday, December 03, 2005

Work to ur brain

The exclusive Ichthyophage Club was invited to hold its annual
dinner at a resort on the Costa Fortuna last summer.
Several members accepted the invitation and each was asked
to bring one of the local seafood specialities as their
contribution to the feast.
The fare consisted of: the local edible starfish which has five legs,
the squid which has ten and octopus.
Each guest provided one such creature and, in fact, more
people provided octopus than provided starfish.
A chef was hired locally.
He arranged the food so that each guest
received a plateful consisting of the same number of legs -
--at least one leg from each species - but no guest's plate
was made up in the same way as any other guest's plate.
In other words, no guest had the same combination of
legs on his plate as any other guest did.
When the food had been arranged in this way the chef was
annoyed to find that all the legs had been used,
leaving no edible fragments for him to take home to his family.


How many guests were there? How many brought octopus, how many brought starfish, and how many brought squid?
--Aj


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