Three Humans, two Monkeys & one Gorilla was a game/puzzle that we had to solve in class today (2014-01-17). Our objective was to get all of our popsicle sticks across a river, we had three different color popsicle sticks: one purple, two green and three blue. The blue popsicle sticks were humans, green were monkeys and the purple was a gorilla. There was one boat, the boat could only hold two popsicle sticks at a time but could not hold both monkeys because monkeys couldn’t drive the boat. The one last rule that made this almost impossible was that the apes could not outnumber the humans at any time or they would kill the humans and you would lose, Example: Two apes and one human on the one side of the river at any time would mean “game over”. Once me and my partner (Harry) knew the rules it was only a matter of trying to figure out how to complete the puzzle. The first challenge we had to overcome was an opening move. If we sent the gorilla and a human over first and left the human on the far side the gorilla would kill the two humans on his return. It took us about fifteen minutes of trying and failing before Harry came up with the idea of trying it backwards. We realized we needed to have all the humans and the gorilla on the far side and then we would win, (the gorilla could just go back and forth bringing the monkeys over). We spent about five minutes trying to solve it and we did but sadly we forgot how we did it. We then had to solve it again and this time record all the moves we made. We finally solved the puzzle and recorded all the moves that we made! We started by moving both monkeys to one side with the gorilla, the gorilla than brings the boat back and two humans go over. One humans then brings a monkey back to the side they started on meaning that one human and one monkey are on the far side but the boat is on the side we started on. The gorilla and a human then take the boat over and a human and a monkey take it back. This means that a human and the gorilla are on the far side without the boat. The two humans on the original side then take the boat to the far side, the gorilla makes two trips to get the monkeys and VICTORY!!! I had a lot of fun with this puzzle and am looking forward to any more puzzles that we do in the future.