This topic is locked
WARNING: the following answer is one of those "nitpicky" type answers, but I'm really just trying to inject some humor.
Several people have suggested that the answer is infinite because you can subtract 2 from 32 once (32-2 = 30), and then you can do it again (32-2=30), and then you can do it again...as many times as you want.
There's a flaw in this though - the question asks how many times YOU can subtract 2 from 32. It takes a discreet amount of time to do that calculation, although it is pretty quick. Given that the action takes a discreet amount of time, and YOU will only live for discreet amount of time, there is a limit to the number of times that YOU can subtract 2 from 32.
Assuming that a person devotes the rest of their life to doing just this:
It takes me about 2.5 seconds to say "thirty two minus two equals thirty" at a normal pace, but if you are a speed talker, or if you're doing it in your head, you can certainly do it faster. Even it's 1 second per transaction, it's unlikely that you'll live to be more than 150 years old, and anyone reading this riddle has to be at least 3 years old to actually be able to read it, so:
(150-3)years x 365.25days x 24hours x 60minutes x 60 seconds = 4,638,967,200 times.
So my answer to the question: roughly 4.5 billion times.
You totally sucked the fun out of it..., but it was a fun answer
