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Weekly brain teaser | A gang of 17 thieves steals a bag of gold coins

fight it out Good luck

Every week we feature a Brain Teaser or a thought-provoking question.

If you have one that you would like to share with fellow engineers please email it to info@engineeringdaily.net.

So, here is this week’s,

A gang of 17 thieves steals a bag of gold coins. In trying to share the coins equally, there are three coins remaining. In the ensuing fight over these three coins, one of the gang members is killed. In the next attempt to equally distribute the coins, there are 10 coins remaining. Again the gang fights, and another member dies. The third attempt is successful.

What is the smallest number of coins stolen?

The correct answer will be posted a week following this posting.

Good luck.

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Posted by Ken.Kabaki on Apr 20th, 2009 and filed under Discussions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

8 Responses for “Weekly brain teaser | A gang of 17 thieves steals a bag of gold coins”

  1. Heinz Rosen says:
    May 22, 2009 at 5:47 pm

    Tom:
    I guess great minds do think alike. I had not seen your answer when I struggled with this problem. I couldn’t find an algebraic solution either and independently came up with the same Excel ‘brute force’ approach with one exception, instead of using an “If” discriminator I just scanned down the three columns until I found the first row with three integers – which, of course, was 3930. The reason that Einstein would not have used that approach is because the operating system of the Babbage mechanical ‘computer’ of the period couldn’t run the Excel software.

    Reply
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