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Bridge Crossing

A release-checked easy problem for training Brainteasers.

Question

David, Emma, Frank, and Grace need to cross a river. The only possible way to cross the river is a bridge that can only hold at maximum $2$ people at once. It's night time, so they can only cross the bridge using a lantern and they only have $1$ lantern. Each pair of people can only cross at the pace of the slowest person. All people need to get across as fast as possible. Their crossing times are as follows: David takes $10$ minutes, Emma takes $5$ minutes, Frank takes $2$ minutes, and Grace takes $1$ minute. What is the minimum time required for all of them to get across to the other side?

Practice focus

This Brainteasers problem is tagged Brainteasers. State the random variables and conditioning information explicitly, then check the result against boundary cases before opening hints or a solution.

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