Pickett

Hmm...I must have a flaw in my program as this was the approach I was going with, but I had more than the 44 sets that you came up with (which is why I couldn't narrow it down at the end)...nice solve k-man...I'll have to go back and see where my program is wrong.

hmm...so far I have it down to 25 possibilities...still working on it...but probably won't get to it before tomorrow, at which point this will probably be solved. Great variation on this type of puzzle though!! Thanks Bonanova!

Yeah, this is a duplicate...I posted this quite a while ago: One of my favorites

This riddle reminds me very much of one that my dad (who just recently passed away) always used to tell me. You can read his telling of it here, on his blog ("I've Got a Blue Spot" was originally going to be the title of a book he was going to write...but turned into the start of a blog instead...the name coming from the riddle): http://www.ivegotabluespot.com/archives/18

I'd say there's as much loss of precision as there is in pouring from one container to the other (there's always left over water in the original container...even if it's just drops)... I fully admit that my method has a number of built in assumptions: My original assumption that the beakers are perfect cylinders/rectangular prisms The containers hold EXACTLY the number of gallons represented...not a drop more, nor less...(of course, this causes problems in that the second you MOVE a container to pour into another, you would lose some...unless you had an infinitely steady hand...) You have a perfect eye and can tell the exact second the bottom corner is visible and stop pouring at exactly that time I'm treating this as a purely mathematical problem...meaning I'm ignoring the surface tension of water, any distortion caused by the beakers in your reading, etc.. Definitely not a perfect answer, but I'd say you could get "close enough" with it...much closer than just guessing the amounts