Another token game as Le Monde mathematical puzzle: Archibald and Beatrix play with a pile of n>100 tokens, sequentially picking m tokens from the pile with m being a prime number [including m=1] or a multiple of 6, the winner taking the last tokens. If Beatrix knows n and proposes to Archibald to start, what […]
Category: brute force
Le Monde puzzle [#1104]
A palindromic Le Monde mathematical puzzle: In a monetary system where all palindromic amounts between 1 and 10⁸ have a coin, find the numbers less than 10³ that cannot be paid with less than three coins. Find if 20,191,104 can be paid with two coins. Similarly, find if 11,042,019 can be paid with two or […]
Le Monde puzzle [#1099]
A simple 2×2 Le Monde mathematical puzzle: Arielle and Brandwein play a game out of two distinct even integers between 1500 and 2500, and y. Providing one another with either the pair (x/2,y+x/2) or the pair (x+y/2,y/2) until they run out of even possibilities or exceed 6 rounds. When x=2304, what is the value of […]
Le Monde puzzle [#1094]
A rather blah number Le Monde mathematical puzzle: Find all integer multiples of 11111 with exactly one occurrence of each decimal digit.. Which I solved by brute force, by looking at the possible range of multiples (and borrowing stringr:str_count from Robin!) > combien=0 > for (i in 90001:900008){ j=i*11111 combien=combien+(min(stringr::str_count(j,paste(0:9)))==1)} > combien [1] 3456 And […]
Le Monde puzzle [#1092]
A Latin square Le Monde mathematical puzzle that I found rather dreary: A hidden 3×3 board contains all numbers from 1 to 9. Anselm wants to guess the board and makes two proposals. Berenicke tells him how many entries are in the right rows and colums for each proposal, along with the information that no […]
Le Monde puzzle [#1088]
A board (Ising!) Le Monde mathematical puzzle in the optimisation mode, again: On a 7×7 board, what is the maximal number of locations that one can occupy when imposing at least two empty neighbours ? Which I tried to solve by brute force and simulated annealing (what else?!), first defining a target targ=function(tabz){ sum(tabz[-c(1,9),-c(1,9)]-1.2*(tabz[-c(1,9),-c(1,9)]*tabz[-c(8,9),-c(1,9)] +tabz[-c(1,9),-c(1,9)]*tabz[-c(1,2),-c(1,9)] […]
Le Monde puzzle [#1086]
A terse Le Monde mathematical puzzle in the optimisation mode: What is the maximal fraction of the surface of a triangle occupied by an inner triangle ABC where Abigail picks a summit A on a first side, Berenice B on a second side, and then Abigails picks C on the third side, towards Abigail maximising […]