Right, first things first apologies to all those who answered my last query on vinyl for not responding earlier. Thanks for the info, unfortunately we had a cull that week in the office on abuse of internet facilities so i’ve been keeping my head down of late.
Anyway, the boss is away now so…
Add 6 numbers up to equal 20. You cannot use the same number more than once, 0 is not a number, no decimal places, no negative numbers.
I’ve been told that there is a mathematical solution to this but I’m damned if I can figure it out. I actually think it’s a wind-up but any help gratefully received
I figured it was impossible, just checking i’d not missed something really obvious. It’ll be some daft answer, some kind of play on words. I’m off for my weekend now, later guys
Okay, Gyan9, I got it. Took me some puzzling and now I´m late for a party… - was fun though, being the geek that I am.
I´ll post it in a spoiler, though, so nobody can blame me…
Go on puzzling!!!
It´s 142857. How did I get it? Well, obviously it can´t include 0. Plus, it must be <200,000, otherwise the multiplication with five would make it a 7 digit number. so a=1.
so, let´s see - ef yields 1 as the last digit, so f=7. 27=14, so b=4. 57=35, so e=5. 47=28, so d=8. the figures always run in the same sequence, so we take 14c857 and multiplicate it with 2. the last three digits give you 714 and a 1 to be added to c, so in order for it to yield 5, c must be 2. voila!
Oh, this sounds terribly fuzzy, I´m not good at putting my thought processes into words, and maybe there´s an easier way - but it works
well, okay, if you´re trying to figure it out and don´t want to read the whole solution above - here´s a hint…
only read this if you feel you must!
it´s a six digit number. it remains a six digit number. and there´s some order to it.
here´s another one, and it requires extremely lateral thinking (wrecked my brains on this one):
errrm… wrecked my brains??? certainly looks like it…
okay, so I wrecked my brains racking my brains trying to figure out the solution. and it ate away my brain´s language centre, methinks.
Nice little puzzle that, once I’d convinced myself that the answer was not 000000. Apart from the first step, my method was different from universe.zips, but involved the same kind of logical steps.
- was fun though, being the geek that I am.