Mathematics 12 - Puzzle Prime

Policeman and Thief

Section: Brain Teasers Category: Mathematics

Difficulty: Expert

A town consists of 3 horizontal and 3 vertical roads, separated by 4 square blocks. A policeman and a thief are running along the roads with speeds of 21km/h and 10km/h respectively. Show that the policeman has a strategy ensuring he will eventually see the thief.

Remark: The policeman can see the thief if they are on the same road at some moment. He has no idea about his position at any time.

SOLUTION

A working strategy for the policeman would be to go to the center and to start encompassing the four blocks clock-wise one by one, in a clockwise manner.

Since the policeman is twice as fast as the thief if the thief is in the center of the town at some point, then there exists a moment in which the policeman is in the center, and the thief is not on the boundary, i.e. he gets shot.

Now, assuming the thief never visits the center, his angle with respect to the coordinate system defined by the two middle roads changes continuously. The angle of the policeman with respect to the same coordinate system can be defined to change continuously as well. Since the policeman needs less time to increase his angle with 360 degrees than the thief, there will be a moment when the two have the same angle. However, this implies that the policeman will be able to see the thief and shoot him.

Unknown Author August 16, 2017

0 Comments

Tetris Puzzle

Section: Brain Teasers Category: Mathematics

Difficulty: Advanced

As a birthday present last year, I received some fridge magnets. They didn’t come as a puzzle, so I don’t know if they have a solution, but I made a puzzle out of them anyway. The magnets are tetrominoes. There are 7 of each shape. Is it possible to arrange them into a 7×28 rectangle so that they are all used and all inside the rectangle? The closest I have managed is this:

SOLUTION

No, it is impossible. Imagine you are placing the tetrominoes on a 7×28 chess board. All of them, except for the T-shaped ones cover exactly 2 black and 2 white cells. Each of the T-shaped tetrominos covers either 2 more black cells than white cells or 2 more white cells than black cells. Since there are 7 of them, combined they will cover either more black cells than white cells or more white cells than black cells. Therefore all pieces on the picture can not cover perfectly a rectangle, which contains an equal number of black and white cells.

Source:

Puzzling StackExchange

James Webster July 16, 2017

0 Comments

15 Puzzle

Section: Brain Teasers Category: Mathematics

Difficulty: Expert

On the picture, you can see the famous “15 Puzzle”. The rules are simple – you can slide any of the 15 squares to the empty spot if it neighbors with it. The question is: if the squares with numbers 14 and 15 are exchanged, can you solve the puzzle, i.e. can you bring it to the state shown on the picture?

SOLUTION

No, you can’t. In order to see this, at each moment count the number of pairs of little squares, which are wrongly ordered. For example, if the numbers on the first row are 7, 2, 12 and 5 in this order, then 7 and 2, 7 and 5, and 12 and 5 are wrongly ordered. Notice that after every move you make, the number of wrongly ordered pairs changes with an odd number – ± 3 or ± 1. If you want to go from the state in which squares 14 and 15 are exchanged to the solved state on the picture, you must make an even number of moves and therefore you would change the number wrongly ordered pairs by an even number. However, the number of wrongly ordered squares in the starting state is 1, whereas in the ending state is 0, which yields a contradiction.

Unknown Author June 10, 2017

0 Comments

Wine and Water

Section: Brain Teasers Category: Mathematics

Difficulty: Medium

You have two 1 liter mugs – one of them halfway filled with water and the other one halfway filled with wine. You pour 300ml water from the first mug into the second one, stir it well, then pour 300ml of the mix from the second mug back to the first one. Now, do you have more water in the first mug than you have wine in the second one?

SOLUTION

If you have X ml water in the first mug, then in the second mug you have 500-X ml water and X ml wine. Therefore you have exactly as much water in the first mug as you have wine in the second one.

Unknown Author May 13, 2017

0 Comments

Non-Negative

Section: Brain Teasers Category: Mathematics

Difficulty: Advanced

You have a rectangular grid and arbitrary real numbers in its cells. You are allowed repeatedly to multiply the elements in any row or any column by -1. Prove that you can make all row sums and all column sums non-negative simultaneously.

SOLUTION

If there is any row or column in the grid with a negative sum, multiply it by -1. Since on every step the total sum of the numbers in the grid increases, we will be able to do this procedure only finitely many times. In the end, all row sums and column sums will be non-negative.

Unknown Author May 10, 2017

0 Comments

Chessboard Infection

Section: Brain Teasers Category: Mathematics

Difficulty: Hard

On a standard 8×8 chessboard there are 7 infected cells. Every minute each cell which has at least 2 infected neighbors gets infected as well. Is it possible for the entire chessboard to get infected eventually?

SOLUTION

The total perimeter of the infected regions never increases. If there are 7 infected cells initially, their total perimeter is at most 28. The perimeter of an 8×8 square is 32. Therefore, it is impossible to infect the entire chessboard.

Unknown Author May 4, 2017

2 Comments