Good Monday gentle readers, and welcome back to school. As you yourself may currently be aware, the most important meal of the day as far as your weak human brain is concerned, might just be a balanced breakfast (I am not a medical specialist, scientist or licensed foodologist but I make a good faith effort to research all my claims. In this case I’ll give myself 3:1 odds that I am right). Since it’s already 9:30 AM EST I assume the vast majority of you are already on your third bowl of CTC by now, so you already have that balanced part covered. To get your brain pumping a little harder, here is a question for you:

“Suppose there was one of six prizes inside your favorite box of cereal. Perhaps it’s a pen, a plastic movie character, or a picture card. How many boxes of cereal would you expect to have to buy, to get all six prizes?”

As a note, this problem also applies to happy meals and “that game where you have a blind person get you some candy from the vending machine” (you know it as TGWYHABPGYSCFTVM most likely). Well what you are looking at here is a simple example of what we foodologists call The Cereal Box Problem. In the example provided by George Reese in the above-linked, his cereal actually offers 8 trading cards: Alligator, Elephant, Giraffe, Lion, Otters, Spider, Swan and Tiger. Wouldn’t you feel like a chump if you ended up with Giraffe when there was a Swan card to be had? Do some math and see if you can solve this mystery that has eluded our ancestors for millions of years. Or just read on for the spoiler…

Well the answer as it turns out, is 14.7 Don’t believe me? Play with this little java applet and test it out yourself. STILL don’t believe me? Then go to the store, find a cereal with 6 different prizes equally distributed and buy them until you get one of each. Repeat this process approximately an infinite number of times and average the number of boxes it took you to get all six prizes for each trial. If you still dont believe me then the best I can do is offer a white paper by some guy who is not a board certified foodologist.