Over the weekend I wrote a little ugly perl in order to solve the ‘four fours‘ problem. Essentially the problem is to make as many positive integers as you can, using only four occurrences of the digit ’4′, and some mathematical symbols. For instance: 17 = ( 4 * 4 ) + ( 4 / 4 […]
Browsing Posts tagged mathematics
This post is the continuation of my answer to the elves, cakes and gremlins puzzle. One remaining question is the validity of the assumption that its quick and easy to find a value of S that is coprime to the value of L. I blithely asserted this easy, as the probability that two numbers are […]
Here’s my answer to the elves, cakes and gremlins puzzle. I’m quite sure this is not the only solution, and it may well not be the best solution, but I believe it works. I think the key to this puzzle is criterion 3: “Assuming there is at least one locker that remains empty throughout an […]
A locker room contains a number of lockers (L), and a number of elves (E). The elves are attempting to put cakes in the lockers, cake by cake, to feed cake-eating gremlins (obviously) that have access to the lockers through a rear door. We can assume E << L, and that some external entity is […]
