Baron Munchhausen Redeems Himself: Bounds for a Coin-Weighing Puzzle

Author(s)
Khovanova, Tanya; Lewis, Joel Brewster
Thumbnail
DownloadKhovanova-2011-Baron Munchhausen.pdf (145.7Kb)
PUBLISHER_POLICY
Terms of use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Metadata
Show full item record
Abstract
We investigate a coin-weighing puzzle that appeared in the 1991 Moscow Math Olympiad. We generalize the puzzle by varying the number of participating coins, and deduce an upper bound on the number of weighings needed to solve the puzzle that is noticeably better than the trivial upper bound. In particular, we show that logarithmically-many weighings on a balance suffice.
Date issued
2011-02
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/89805
Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mathematics
Journal
Electronic Journal of Combinatorics
Publisher
Electronic Journal of Combinatorics
Citation
Khovanova, Tanya, and Joel Brewster Lewis. "Baron Munchhausen Redeems Himself: Bounds for a Coin-Weighing Puzzle." Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, Volume 18, Issue 1 (2011).
Version: Final published version
ISSN
1077-8926
Collections