Thought of this mathematics puzzle while cooking cubes of tofu the other day. It sounds like a probability problem, but I am not getting anywhere. The puzzle:
You're cooking C cubes of something in a pan to brown them. It's not necessary to brown all sides of all cubes, but you want to brown at least N sides of all cubes. Cube sides are considered "browned" when they spend at least SB seconds on the bottom, in contact with the pan. Every SS seconds you shake the pan to arbitrarily rearrange the cubes' orientations. By counting only the number of browned cube sides facing up, B, what is the minimum B/C that will allow you to be 95% (say) confident that all cubes have at least N sides browned.
I'm a PhD engineer turned IT so have a fair amount of mathematics background. Probability is not one of my strong suits, however.