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Sunday Times Teaser 2866 – On the Rack

by Nick MacKinnon

Published August 27 2017 (link)

I have wine in a rectangular rack consisting of five rows and eight columns. The bottles are made up of five different vintages with each vintage (four reds and four whites) forming a rectangle in the rack. Within each vintage-rectangle the places occupied by the whites form a connected set, and the same is true of the reds. No two vintage-rectangles have the same red/white pattern, no matter what angle they are viewed at from the front.

In the rack the first row is a mixture of reds and whites, with a red on the extreme right. Another row contains just reds, and the first column contains more reds than than any other column.

What (in order) are the colours of the wines in the second row?

One Comment Leave one →
  1. Brian Gladman permalink

    This is a teaser that is a great deal harder to program than it is to solve manually.

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