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Sunday Times Teaser 3115 – Germometric Mean

by BRG on June 1, 2022

by Stephen Hogg

Published Sunday June 05 2022 (link)

On Whit Monday, Zak began self-isolating upstairs. At lunchtime Kaz shouted up, “What’s a Geometric Mean?” “It’s the Nth root of the product of N values,” Zak replied.

On TV, Teaseside hospital’s “geovid” admissions for the seven days prior were listed alongside their Geometric Mean. Kaz stated that chronologically the numbers comprised a decreasing set of two-figure values, Friday’s value equalling the Geometric Mean. She added that, curiously, there was a value double the Geometric Mean, but not triple, whereas the Geometric Mean was triple a data value, but not double a data value. She then told Zak just the Geometric Mean.

Zak worked out the unique data set.

Give the seven numbers in chronological order.

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19 Comments Leave one →
  1. Brian Gladman permalink

    With speed improvement suggested by Frits below.

    • Frits permalink

      @Brian, removing elements 2 * G and 3 * G from divs looks to be more efficient.

      Shouldn’t you theoretically also check that the last element of v4 is less than G (as you have removed the Friday check)?

      • Brian Gladman permalink

        Good point on the absent check, I’ll add that. I have previously checked the
        alternative approach you suggest and found there was no significant speed
        difference, both being under 200 microseconds on my system with CPython.

  2. John Z permalink

    “Germometric” ???

  3. John Z. permalink

    Posted using crayon

    • Frits permalink

      Hi John,

      Nice solution.

      You have forgotten the fv * 3 exclusion (if fv is 30).

      • John Z. permalink

        Thanks Frits. And you’re right I missed that constraint. I should have parsed the Teaser more carefully.

        line 28 should be:

        This does not however change the result.

  4. John Z. permalink

    Here is a simplified and certainly easier to understand version of my previous code. It is not necessarily faster though as it calls factors() 364 times.

    • Brian Gladman permalink

      @John

      I time your original as 3.2 milliseconds and this one at 4 milliseconds. The
      calls to factors() are relatively expensive and can be avoided by using

      in place of lines 12 to 16 to improve the speed to 2.4 milliseconds.

      • John Z. permalink

        Well spotted, Brian, clearly a necessary condition for the ‘if’ statement in line 24 to be True. You’ve factored out ‘factors()’ completely. Reverting to manual multiplication instead of prod() might help with speed: it’s called 3997 times.

  5. Brian Gladman permalink

    Here is a solution with a difference suggested by GeoffR using Jim Randell’s minizinc.py interface to the MiniZinc constraint modelling language.

    The seemingly odd constraint on line 31 is needed in order to avoid MiniZinc’s 64-bit limit on integer size.

    • Frits permalink

      Nice workaround,

      You also could have used:

    • Frits permalink

      The answer is not a decreasing set of numbers.

      • Brian Gladman permalink

        @Frits

        It does if you leave line 15 in.

        • Frits permalink

          What I mean is that what you print is not a decreasing sequence.
          You print A, B, C, D, E, F and what is asked is A, B, C, D, G, E, F.

          • Brian Gladman permalink

            Ah, I hadn’t noticed that.

  6. Frits permalink

    You will have to install packages z3 and z3-solver.
    It is quite slow (13 seconds), without the exclusions it is very slow.

  7. Brian Gladman permalink

    I tried quite a few constraint solvers but not z3. It is interesting and seems very flexible. There is a small amount of coverage of such techniques here already (although I don’t want to diverge too far from the Python theme).

  8. Frits permalink

    Another, a lot more efficient (90 ms).

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