Brick Puzzle
After reading my post, Shapovalov’s Gnomes, Grant, one of my readers, directed me to the Brick puzzle from Section 2.3 of Xinfeng Zhou’s A Practical Guide to Quantitative Finance Interviews.
Puzzle. Can you pack 53 bricks with dimensions 1-by-1-by-4 into a 6-by-6-by-6 box?
The solution in Zhou’s book has some flaws. So I am posting my own solution here.
Share:Solution. We start with a sanity check. The box contains 216 unit cube cells, and 53 bricks would take up 212 cells. So there is no contradiction with the volume. We need to look at something else.
Let’s divide the box into 27 smaller 2-by-2-by-2 boxes and color the smaller boxes in a checkerboard manner. We get 13 boxes of one color, say white, and 14 boxes of another color, say black. Whichever way we place a brick inside the original box, it has to cover 2 white cells and 2 black cells. But we have a total of 104 white cells, which is only enough for 52 bricks.
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