Problem Set 4
The Freshthing Housing Assignment System
The following fragment of a confidential memo was discovered in the trash on the second floor of Building 3.
to announce the fruition of the long-range plan, initiated by the Killian administration in the 1950s, to expand MIT's sources of revenue, increase our pool of outstanding students, and augment the diversity of our student body, by opening admissions to sentient beings applying from anywhere in the Universe.
As you know, MIT admissions applications were encoded into the original television transmissions of ``I Love Lucy,'' which resulted in them being widely broadcast throughout the galaxy. We've just received word from our friends at the SETI project that we should expect to matriculate a large number of outstanding freshthings in the school year beginning September 1998.
We will be enrolling a diverse group of freshthings from a variety of extraterrestrial communities. Some of these freshthings can only comfortably survive in a reducing atmosphere of methane. For some of them we need to maintain temperatures between 350K and 370K. Some of them can be comfortable only when submerged in a solution of ethanol. This last case is particularly worrisome, because maintaining an appropriate environment for our ethanol-breathing freshthings violates our published alcohol policy. I am sure we will muddle through. However, we need to act quickly to understand the problem so we can begin construction of appropriate facilities in Random Hall.
We will also have to arrange with Food Services to provide ...
The rest of the memo was missing, but you can see the problem. This assignment is an attempt to take the first steps in sorting ``things'' out.