You might not like this challenge as much as the last one.

There will be no competition in a competitor vs competitor sense (CVC) but instead a competitor vs environment sense (CVE).

It is nontheless a fight between life, death, love, disgust and satiation.

"The second challenge is... an eating contest. Fitting to the name of Hungry Games.", I declare to the competitors and the remaining world that is watching.

"You might think that's too easy and completely breaks the theme. But I assure you, that it is not. I will assign each of you a 4G hot spot that is microwave cooking one or several cities, and the one who consumes the least amount of calories coming from within the hot spot within this day or dies to the deadly microwaves coming from the 4G tower, will be disqualified for world leadership.", I continue.

"Despite there being an irregular amount of calories in the hot spot zones, I will make it more fair. If someone somehow manages to clear their zone, they will be assigned another zone. Movement between and towards zones will also be part of the challenge that the competitors have to master. That's it.", I close my statement.

Then I go and unveil the wheel of fortune that I had prepared. For this I had to do some stochastic calculations to come up with all possible distributions of hot spot zones to divide the wheel of fortune into.

After looking up long lost knowledge I had calculated the number of possibilities for 4 competitors spread over 8 distinct locations that only one competitor at a time should occupy:

There would be 24 possibilities if it were just 4 locations (4*3*2*1).

4 locations of 8 are always occupied.

If you (for the sake of math) do not consider these 4 locations different and spread them over 8 slots, you have uh hmm can I make that easier?

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

So if I considered 3 locations already locked in, the fourth location would have 5 possible places to be in... is this just 5*5*5*5 times 24?

Let's do some tests with 2 places in 4 and brute force the result to control whether theory is right.

So this would be 9 with the theory, brute force says 6. So that's a no.

Frogget it, I'll just brute force the result by counting it up.

But I am too lazy to do that.

What a conundrum. Ok let's go at it again.

In the brute force approach, all it does is pulse weirdly towards the right side when counting up. The number of pulses is what I want to get.

So how fast can the pulsing worm/snake get to the other side?

The further it pulses towards the right side, the longer it takes for the tail to catch up with the head. The distance is the same for all parts of the tail.

So if the head moves 1 away, all the parts will take 1 turn to move towards the head.

I think I got it now: 3*1+3*2+3*3+3*4+3*5, or 3^15 for short.

So that's quite convenient - so I have to divide that into 3^15 * 24 ... oh shit that are going to be a lot of slots. Wheel of fortune is a no go... why not pull a bunch of colored ping pong balls from a closed container and the resulting sequence will determine who goes into which area? Simple but genious.

I kick the (now useless) wheel off the stage and throw away the pen with which I had been writing down the calculations on a whiteboard. Everyone looks shocked from the sudden action after what felt like hours of watching some nerd calculating something and drawing worms in different colors. A black box materializes and within several colored balls.

"Ok, sorry about that. School really did frog with my sense of practicality. Stay hyped tho.", I announce to the bored audience.