Golden Gate Invitational 23-24
60
What was the total global energy consumption of Google in 2022, in Joules?
11
How many times more permutations of a deck of cards are there than positions of a Rubik’s cube?
48
What is the ratio of the gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States to that of San Marino?
4
A “blue moon” occurs when a full moon occurs twice in a single calendar month. How many times could light circle the Earth’s equator between one blue moon and the next, on average?
9
If you pick a random point on the night sky, what is the probability that it is contained within the shadow of Sagittarius A*, the black hole in the center of the Milky Way?
-20
What is the probability that, on any given day in Singapore, there is a total solar eclipse?
-5
How many milliseconds elapsed between the Battle of Hastings and D-Day?
13
One of this tournament’s sponsors, Jane Street Capital, is known as a high-frequency quantitative trading firm, with multiple offices around the world. In 2020, what was the total worth of the securities that they traded, in US dollars?
13
How many sheets of paper, stacked on top of each other, would it take to equal the height of the Stanford Tree?
4
How old is the universe thought to be, in years?
10
If all of the world’s freshwater was replaced by FairlifeTM Ultra-filtered Chocolate Milk, then how many calories would I gain from drinking it all?
22
How long, in seconds, would it take for someone driving a Koenigsegg Jesko Absolut to drive from UC Berkeley to Stanford, by way of I-280 South (over the Bay Bridge, down through SF and San Mateo County)? Assume the driver is a speed demon and continuously maintains the theoretical highest speed while operating on E85 race fuel.
3
The California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park is home to a colony of African penguins. Suppose that a highly motivated wild African penguin wants to visit his captive comrades, and is blessed by the ancient penguin gods to not require any food, water, or rest. How many hours would it take him to swim at top speed from his homeland of South Africa to San Francisco? By the way, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know of the Panama Canal’s existence...
3
How many peregrine falcons does it take to lift up an average human?
2
How many base pairs are in the human genome?
9
If the US Department of Transportation was around back then, what would they value the statistical loss of life from the Hindenburg disaster to be, in 2022 dollars?
8
A flop is a basic unit of computation denoting 1 addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division operation. On average, how many flops does it take to solve a system of linear equations in 80 variables and 80 equations?
6
Suppose that I’m getting tired of eating at school dining halls and instead want to eat the Dunkin’ Donuts Sourdough breakfast sandwich 2 times a day for the entirety of spring semester at UC Berkeley. How many times would I have to run the Boston Marathon in order to burn all of those calories?
2
How much money would McDonald’s lose if for every Big Mac sold last year, McDonald’s gave out a 14 oz Filet Mignon instead?
11
It’s often said that a human should consume 2000 Calories/day. How much energy is that in terms of electron volts (eV)?
26
How many days would one have to eat exactly 2000 Calories to have consumed energy equivalent to the yield of the “Fat Man” nuclear bomb?
7
Ramen noodles are a staple of any college student’s diet. How many packs of Shin Black Ramen would I need to eat to have consumed the recommended daily amount of sodium for 50 people?
2
How many shots of espresso would an average U.S. male need to consume in order to have consumed an amount of caffeine equivalent to the LD50 of caffeine?
2
How many peanut M&M’s would one need to equal the weight of a Boeing 737-800?
7
How many oxygen atoms are in 1L of water?
25
How many potatoes would I need to replace every utility (telephone) pole in the U.S. with a McDonald’s hash brown?
8
Going off of the previous question, if I dropped a pebble at a random location in the U.S., what is the probability that I hit one of the McDonald’s hash browns I put down?
-25
How many Bugatti Chirons could I buy with the combined endowment of all Ivy League Schools in the year 2018?
5
What is the (outer) diameter of a standard flu shot needle, in parsecs?
-20
How many standard hairdryers would I need to run simultaneously to have a power output equal to that of the sun?
23
Apparently woodchucks don’t actually chuck wood. But anyways, how much wood, in mm3 , could a woodchuck chuck in a galactic year if a woodchuck chucks wood at a rate of 1 mm3 per picosecond?
28
How many ways are there to travel from the coordinates (0, 0) to (100, 100) if you can only move between lattice points to the right and upwards and cannot cross above the main diagonal?
57
What is 49!!? Here, ‘!!’ refers to double factorial, where n!! means the product of all positive integers less than or equal n with the same parity as n.
32
Let x = SUM (n = 1 ... 100000) 1/n. What is e^x?
5
What is the probability that a random chosen subset of the positive integers less than or equal to 10 is a subset of the positive integers less than or equal to 4?
-2
What is the total distance, in meters, traveled by the world’s commercial airplanes in one day?
10
How many Stanford alumni are living today?
5
How many book volumes are in UC Berkeley libraries?
7
What is the total combined annual budget of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, in US dollars?
9
How many colors are used in the tile mosaics in Stanford’s Memorial Church?
4
How many undergraduate international students’ yearly tuition at UC Berkeley can be paid for by China’s 2023 defense budget?
7
How many Nobel Prize medals could be cast using the amount of gold that Mansa Musa donated during his historically significant pilgrimage to Mecca?
5
The plucky tardigrades of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, inspired by their distinct cousin Oski the Bear, seek to attack Stanford University on the eve of the Axe Game. Taking advantage of a captured cache of human blood, how many red blood cells will these “water bears” need to build a bridge to Stanford Stadium? The bridge has to be wide enough for them to march single-file, and is a straight line in the air.
12
DDT is an insecticide that was widely used in the 20th century, before being banned due to public outcry that it was inadvertently causing declines in populations of America’s national bird, the bald eagle, due to fertility issues. How much DDT, ingested orally, in picograms, would have a 50% chance of killing an adult blue whale?
17
How many rolls of toilet paper would I need to completely cover the surface area of the earth?
14
If I drained 50000 cubic meters of water from Lake Superior for everytime Wildest Dreams (Taylor’s Version) was streamed on Spotify, how much would the depth of Lake Superior change, in meters?
2
How many oxygen atoms would I inhale if I sat and listened to the entirety of the Midnights (The Til Dawn Edition) album by Taylor Swift?
25
In “invisible string”, Taylor Swift sings “one single thread of gold tied me to you”. How much would a rod of solid gold, stretching from Philadelphia to Berkeley with diameter equal to that of 3-ply twine, be worth, in US Dollars?
11
What is the angular velocity of the Big Ass Fans E-Series 12-ft 6-blade commercial Ceiling Fan spinning at its highest speed in gradians/millisecond? (gradians is not a typo)
-5
How much Bitcoin (at the highest recorded price in history) could I buy with the cost of a 35-stick pack of Wrigley’s Extra Spearmint Sugar Free Chewing Gum?
-5
Fun fact: there’s a (not-so) secret tunnel underneath UC Berkeley that connects the Gardner Main Stacks under our flagship Doe Memorial Library to Moffitt Undergraduate Library next door. Although you’ll need a Cal 1 Card to gain access, this event supervisor luckily has one :D Suppose I’m practicing for a marathon and need a quiet place to train. How many times would I need to run through the Moffitt portion of the tunnel to get to an equivalent distance of a marathon?
3
In the name of inter-university cooperation, the administration of UC Berkeley decides to dig another tunnel connecting two libraries. One is Doe Memorial, and the other is... Cecil H. Green Library at Stanford... If this new passageway is a direct, straight line from Doe to Green, and has the same height and width as an average door, then how many cubic inches of earth would have to be displaced?
10
Continuing in the spirit of inter-university cooperation, suppose that the students from Berkeley and Stanford want to break the record for the loudest sound ever recorded. To do this, each student decides to scream as loud as they can. How many students, collectively screaming, will be needed to break this record? Assume that each student screams at a sound level of 80 dB.
23
Realizing that breaking the record for loudest sound may be a little difficult, the students decide to try their hand at breaking the record for “most people brushing their teeth simultaneously”. With the minimum number of students needed to break this record, how many total grams of fluoride would be found in all the toothpaste used? Assume each student uses a standard, pea-sized amount of toothpaste and everyone uses Colgate Total Original Toothpaste.
1
After all that brushing, these students suddenly feel like having a sweet treat: Honey. However, they want to source their honey only from the bees (assume all bees are honey bees) that assisted Ruan Liangming in his record for “world’s largest mantle of bees”. How much total honey, in tablespoons, would all of those bees produce in their lifetime?
4
Let’s say that all of the rotisserie chickens that Costco sold in 2021 were all alive on the same day. How much feed, in pounds, would be collectively consumed by all of those chickens on that day?
7
If every Leopard 2 main battle tank ever manufactured, the primary tank used by Germany as well as a host of other Western countries, suddenly turned into adult leopards, then how many kilograms of meat would they consume each year?
6
The vast majority of the world’s Internet data is transmitted through underwater fiber-optic cables. What is the total length of these underwater cables, in meters?
9
What is the maximum power a horse can produce, in horsepower?
1
The General Electric GE9X is the world’s largest commercial jet engine, used exclusively on Boeing 777X airplanes. If 10,000 GE9X jet engines were strapped to the Earth’s equator, pointed eastward, and started, how long would it take to stop the Earth’s rotation, in years? Don’t worry about the mass of the Earth changing due to fuel consumption.
10
