puzzle of the day

a cube is made of white material, but he exterior is painted black.
if the cube is cut into 125 smaller cubes of exactly the same size, how many of the cubes will have atleast 2 of their sides painted black?

44

<pre>
3 2 2 2 3
2 2 2
2 2 2
2 2 2
3 2 2 2 3 3
2 2 2
2 2 2
2 2 2
3 2 2 2 3
</pre>
...out of which 36 will have exactly two sides painted and 8 three sides. Painted.
[ April 24, 2002: Message edited by: Mapraputa Is ]

Only the surface small cubes are possible to have black side(s). There are 3 kinds of surface small cubes: corner, edge, and rest. Only corner and edge ones are possible to have more than 1 black sides.
There are 8 corner ones and 3 x 12 = 36 edge ones. So the answer is:
8 + 36 = 44

You see, sona, nobody here is sleeping, we all are waiting for your next puzzle!

Sleeping with who?

well u see guys.. i don't lose my temper so easily
until and unless u really piss me off..
well i will try and post a puzzle whenever possible

ok guys.. the correct answer is 44

Whatever happened to the practice of using the background color so that you didn't have to see the answer unless you wanted to. Out of here for a few days and this is what happens :roll:

yeah i was also thinking... abt this... its not right to put the correct answer so soon.. there might be people who would be wanting to try it out..
any ideas people.. how do we manage this

There are some posts on this from when we were following this practice. Use the font color tag. I have to run to my daughters basketball games. Somebody want to do a search and post the link.

the problem i see with that is there are 2 alternating background colors

Well, they follow pretty regular pattern...
Just look at the last message and figure out that your post will be on another color

Here are tags.
For "light" background:
<font color="#f0e6d5">some text</font>
For "dark" background:
<font color="#eadbc4">some text</font>

If you get the color wrong, it's easy to edit afterwards.

cool

Good demo of using the wrong color.