Umm...
"You know, two men have just completed a robbery. The first man says that he doesn't have enough because if he had to give one stack of his money to the other man, then he would only have half as much. The second man replied, no I don't have enough because I did all the planning and if I gave you one of my stacks, we'd both have the same amount."
My head instinctively said 3 and 2, but obviously that failed. Then I tried a few more things out loud, until Sherry gave up. Then I lay there, thinking about how algebra could solve this. I only needed my graphing calculator from ten years ago and time to relearn how to do algebra. Yes, yes, the equations would be...
I kept lying there and it was driving me mad, so I got up, threw on some pyjamas and headed downstairs to at least write my mental formulas down. Then I couldn't help but google graphing calculators, but that was frustrating because I couldn't quite remember how to use them. So after trying to simplify my equations for awhile, I finally gave up and went back to bed. At least I had something written down to come back to the next day. I only got six hours of sleep, but at least I could sleep.
When I woke up, I knew immediately that I had made a mistake and had doubled the wrong side of one of the equations, and so I grabbed a banana and quickly retried my equation, but they were still horribly complicated and I was sure I must be doing it wrong, because why would a riddle involve this kind of wicked calculus?
After school, I decided to cheat and google key phrases of the riddle, assuming that it wasn't original in the book. Sure enough there was a variation with marbles. Two people had posted replies on the website, and hadn't solved it. The marble version could involve much simpler equations than mine, because mine had to take into account the possibility that the stacks of money weren't necessarily equal.
One of the posted replies had used algebra to discover that negative numbers worked (I'd already tried that the night before but is obviously illogical and not worthy of making a riddle for). But then I perceived that the negative numbers they'd used, worked, as positive. How foolish that they hadn't seen this! Then I noticed that they too had doubled the wrong side of one of their equations and that was their mistake. So I posted the correction, and the answer, and came here to drive all the rest of the world mad. The real riddle, is how I could pass this on to throngs, let alone anyone other than Lisa by writing this on my blog at this point.
I give that last sentence an F too.
