The Mailboxes Manufacturers Problem

In the good old days when Swedish children were still allowed to blowup their fingers with fire-crackers, gangs of excited kids would plague certain smaller cities during Easter time, with only one thing in mind: To blow things up. Small boxes were easy to blow up, and thus mailboxes became a popular target. Now, a small mailbox manufacturer is interested in how many fire-crackers his new mailbox prototype can withstand without exploding and has hired you to help him. He will provide you with k (1 ≤ k ≤ 10) identical mailbox prototypes each fitting up to m (1 ≤ m ≤ 100) crackers. However, he is not sure of how many firecrackers he needs to provide you with in order for you to be able to solve his problem, so he asks you. You think for a while and then say, “Well,if I blow up a mailbox I can’t use it again, so if you would provide me with only k = 1 mailboxes, I would have to start testing with 1 cracker, then 2 crackers, and so on until it finally exploded. In the worst case, that is if it does not blow up even when filled with m crackers, I would need 1 + 2 + 3 + … + m = m × (m + 1) ⁄ 2 crackers. If m = 100 that would mean more than 5000 fire-crackers!” “That’s too many,” he replies. “What if I give you more than k = 1 mailboxes? Can you find a strategy that requires less crackers?”

Can you? And what is the minimum number of crackers that you should ask him to provide you with?

You may assume the following:

1. If a mailbox can withstand x fire-crackers, it can also withstand x − 1 fire-crackers.
2. Upon an explosion, a mailbox is either totally destroyed (blown up) or unharmed, which means that it can be reused in another test explosion.

Note: If the mailbox can withstand a full load of m fire-crackers, then the manufacturer will of course be satisfied with that answer. But otherwise he is looking for the maximum number of crackers that his mailboxes can withstand.