How many five-year-olds?

I know some of you may have already seen this before but I wanted to post about it here now because P and I were talking about it last night. A good friend and former colleague of mine showed me this thread on a forum last year, and I found it extremely fascinating and hilarious. It is a hypothetical question about a hypothetical scenario, and the thread has lasted for well over a year! The first post in the thread was made in January 2005, and the latest post was just two days ago...which means it's still active! That's how brilliant the question is. So let's discuss this here. (I would, however, like to make a disclaimer up front that I do not mean to offend anyone who might be reading this who might have children, and, in particular, a five-year-old. This is all done in jest, and in fact you might be able to offer us some more insight on the matter! However, if you get easily offended by things, please do not read any further.)

Source: 2+2 Forums

The question: How many five-year-olds could you take on at once?

The specifics:

- You are in an enclosed area, roughly the size of a basketball court. There are no foreign objects.
- You are not allowed to touch a wall.
- When you are knocked unconscious, you lose. When they are all knocked unconscious, they lose. Once a kid is knocked unconscious, that kid is "out."
- I (or someone else intent on seeing to it you fail) get to choose the kids from a pool that is twice the size of your magic number. The pool will be 50/50 in terms of gender and will have no discernable abnormalities in terms of demographics, other than they are all healthy Americans (or in this case, Kuwaitis, which could be frightening!).
- The kids receive one day of training from hand-to-hand combat experts who will train them specifically to team up to take down one adult. You will receive one hour of "counter-tactics" training.
- There is no protective padding for any combatant other than the standard-issue cup.
* The kids are motivated enough to not get scared, regardless of the bloodshed. Even the very last one will give it his/her best to take you down.

So P and I seriously discussed this last night. He instinctively first put his number at around 100, but then after thinking about it realistically and looking over the rules he estimated about 25-35. I'm not quite sure. Considering your average 5-year-old weighs about 40 lbs (well, if we're talking non-Kuwaiti at least), that could be dangerous! But then, as people in the forum said, chances are the kids will forget most of their combat training within a few hours. Also, it'll be hard to get them to really work together to bring you down. After all, they're only five years old and most of them probably have A.D.D. But then again, one swift coupe de boule à la Zidane could knock the wind out of you if the kid came towards you running - especially since its head would reach about to your gut. Ugh. Oh, but actually, to hit your gut you'd have to be facing the kid so you'd see it coming, and so you'd have time to stick your knee out to do some serious damage.

So, yeah, I'm not sure where I'd put my number. I think I have to see/test a five-year-old first before I can decide. Does anybody know how I can get my hands on one to try it out? Like P suggested, we could go around the different kindergartens in Kuwait (you know those ones they have in villas in residential neighbourhoods) and tell the parents we are conducting a sociological experiment and we'd pay them KD 500 to use their kid for the day. Then we could charge KD 1000 to each adult who wanted to try it out so that we could break even.

I think I could handle somewhere between 10 and 20 kids.

I love what one person in this forum suggested about knocking out one kid and then using him/her to knock out the other kids as a kind of sword; I envision holding the kid by the feet and spinning round and round in circles and using the head to knock out the rest. Hmmm. I think out of all the tactics, that's the one I'd go for. If I could do that successfully, then I'd go much higher than 20. Hell, then the sky's the limit!

OK I just did a google image search for "five year olds" and they're really not that big. Also, many of them were quite cute and it's starting to soften me and take the fun out of this, so don't really think about what this all means. Don't picture the kids as pretty, cute, charming children. Picture those really bratty, whiney, sweaty terrors we see running around in restaurants here while we're trying to enjoy a decent meal, and think about how many of those you'd want to take out.