# Puzzle : There are two lengths of rope …

You have two lengths of rope. If you set fire to the end of either of them, the rope will burn in exactly one hour. They are not the same length or width as each other. They also are not of uniform width (they might, for example, be wider in the middle than at the end), thus burning half of the rope is not necessarily going to take $30$ minutes. By burning the ropes, how do you measure exactly $45$ minutes worth of time?

Note : I don't know whether a solution even exists at all.

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@ lab bhattacharjee : o, thanks. I did not find it in the net. – Swapnanil Saha Aug 16 '12 at 16:58
For more on the surprisingly fascinating topic of what lengths of time you can measure this way, have a look at math.stackexchange.com/questions/40404/… and the answers to it - they turn out to have some amazing properties, but I don't want to spoil the surprise. – Steven Stadnicki Aug 16 '12 at 17:12
this problem is in cracking the coding interview book – a3.14_Infinity Feb 17 '15 at 7:44