Then you think the total number of seeds is 16!?

Oh, no, 128, as you said earlier - that pic is a top view, the whole thing is 4 layers high. So there are 64 in the cube, 64 in the wall which defines the square.

I was just showing this could be made to work and still have the square touching the faces of the cube.

Yet FFF says this is not the answer. :eyebrow:

FFF, when people are done, please post the official answer and we can have another puzzle trying to figure out how they reached it.

I really should go do stuff. See all yall later.

Hmm, what if it were a square wall around it? i.e. a hollow cube?

For that matter does the cube have to be solid?

if the number were 16, you could make a cube by stacking 2x2x2 = 8, then a ring of 2,2,2,2 = 8

That's true, but that's not very many seeds for a prize-winning pumpkin.

yeah, well... The whole pumpkin with 1ft cubic seeds thing is a bit of a mind fuck anyway....

I mean.... Where the hell did they come up with that shit? They could have used hay bales or coal or...fuck...anything else.

My answer works, so I'm claiming victory for this one. Put me on the list of geniuses.

On second thoughts, yes.

Yeah, this.

The answer, mysteriously enough (they don't give an explanation) is 1024.

if 1024 is the answer,
then the answer is that the cube is 8x8x8 and the square around the cube is 8 layers deep on each side. And the corners are filled in. So each side ends up with 128 cubes.

I guess they wanted the sides to be as thick as the cube.

Today's nut without seminal obfuscation:

i wanna say 60 without doing any math or thinking about it at all.

It doesn't say the acres have to be square. So I assumed the fence is a circle, and was going to do the math with Area=pi*r(squared) and circumference=2*pi*r

But I decided to google it and found that HLJ is correct and they are talking about square plots.

I think we, the Cellar, have come up with several answers that meet the requirements as well as this.

A slightly simpler way to do the maths for this answer would be to imagine the 8x8x8 cube in the middle, then image 8 8x8 flat squares abuting each side and filling the corners. 8 sets of 64 = 512.

Hand back your genius card, sir!


The starting phrase "if one mile of fencing encloses 40 acres ... " fairly strongly implies square fields (although not necessarily).

Clear communication is not the strong point of our nut-setter.