Tonight, for this month’s Snoozecast+ Deluxe bonus episode, we’ll read a Snoozecast original story titled “The Goose, the Fox and the Dog”. In this tale, a quiet farmer returns from a bustling town market with his purchases: a fox, a goose, and a sack of grain. On his way home, he faces a dilemma as to how to cross the riverbank with his goods. The small boat can only carry one of his new acquisitions at a time, but to do so would surely ruin the others before they could be transported across. While the animals ceaselessly squabble and fret, the simple farmer keeps them all safe with his patience and steadiness.

This story is inspired by the classic “river crossing puzzle” in which the object is to carry items from one river bank to another, usually in the fewest trips. The difficulty of the puzzle may arise from restrictions on which or how many items can be transported at the same time, or which or how many items may be safely left together. The earliest known river-crossing problems occur in a manuscript from the 9th century.

This type of puzzle is also a form of recreational mathematics, which is to say it is carried out for entertainment rather than for research, formal education or professional applications. These sorts of puzzles and games are often appealing to children and untrained adults and can inspire their further study of the subject. Some of the more well-known topics in recreational mathematics are Rubik's Cubes, magic squares, fractals, logic puzzles and mathematical chess problems, the culture and aesthetics of mathematics, amusing stories and coincidences about mathematics, and the personal lives of mathematicians.

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