• + 1 comment

    There's no need to actually do the "cut" part, and it can be done in just two passes. The insight here is that number of sticks after all the chops in one round is a number of sticks with the higher length.

    sticks-length sticks-cut
    5 4 4 2 2 8      6
    3 2 2 _ _ 6      4
    1 _ _ _ _ 4      2
    _ _ _ _ _ 3      1
    _ _ _ _ _ _    DONE