intertwingly

My daughter was given the following puzzle as extra credit:

Four men want to cross a bridge.  The bridge is of a width such that a maximum of 2 people may cross at a time. 

One man takes 10 minutes to cross, another takes 5 minutes to cross, another takes 2 minutes to cross, and the last takes 1 minute to cross.

Here is the catch.  If two people cross the bridge together, they must walk at the pace of the slower one. Also, it is night. Each trip requires a flashlight.  There is only one flashlight. The men are not allowed to toss the light over the river.

How fast can you get all 4 men over the bridge?

Note: try to figure it out for yourself before looking at the comments.

SourceForge: The SourceForge.net Service Operations Group has completed the implementation of the Subversion service offering on SourceForge.net

Thanks go out to Joe Gregorio for spotting this and doing the heavy lifting (a few button presses, apparently) to migrate the FeedValidator from CVS to Subversion.

Note: I would point to Joe’s post on the feedvalidator-users mailing list, but due to a ML services issue, the web archives aren’t being updated at the moment.