This topic is stolen directly from another forum which I frequent often. It was perhaps the funniest and most well known off topic post from that forum and I was hoping that it could enjoy some more continued great discussion here. This is the question and rules that follow:
The question: How many 5 year-olds could you take on at once?
The specifics:
- You are in an enclosed area, roughly the size of a basketball court. There are no foreign objects.
- You are not allowed to touch a wall.
- When you are knocked unconscious, you lose. When they are all knocked unconscious, they lose. Once a kid is knocked unconscious, that kid is "out."
- I (or someone else intent on seeing to it you fail) get to choose the kids from a pool that is twice the size of your magic number. The pool will be 50/50 in terms of gender and will have no discernable abnormalities in terms of demographics, other than they are all healthy Americans.
- The kids receive one day of training from hand-to-hand combat experts who will train them specifically to team up to take down one adult. You will receive one hour of "counter-tactics" training.
- There is no protective padding for any combatant other than the standard-issue cup.
* The kids are motivated enough to not get scared, regardless of the bloodshed. Even the very last one will give it his/her best to take you down.
Based on this criteria there have been good answers ranging from 5 to 100. But reasoning it out, how many do you think you can take? The more reasoning, the funnier it actually becomes. Have at it, and obviously because this is a statistics website, use meaningless statistics as much as possible.
