Four Wizards
A cute puzzle found on Facebook:
Puzzle. Four wizards A, B, C, and D, were given three cards each. They were told that the cards had numbers from 1 to 12 written without repeats. The wizards only knew their own three numbers and had the following exchange.
- A: “I have number 8 on one of my cards.”
- B: “All my numbers are prime.”
- C: “All my numbers are composite. Moreover, they all have a common prime factor.”
- D: “Then I know the cards of each of you.”
Given that every wizard told the truth, what cards does A have?
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Blaine:
Without giving the answer away, if you type the numbers in ascending order separated by commas (e.g. “a,b,c”) the MD5 hash is: dc2e3f737c555711b84147b112ed4364
5 December 2021, 1:39 pmBlaine:
Hint 1: B has 5 possible numbers. But if A had any of them, D couldn’t know which were held by A and which were held by B. What does this tell you about how many primes are held by D?
Hint 2: 1 is neither prime nor composite. If D has 1, can he deduce the numbers of A and C. So who has 1?
Hint 3: C could have {6,9,12} or three cards from {4,6,10,12}. D is able to conclusively eliminate one of these cases. That wouldn’t happen if D had 4 or 10. Would that happen if D had 9? Remember C could have any 3 of the 4 numbers in {4,6,10,12}. So what numbers remain as possible ones held by D? And what does that tell you about 9?
Hint 4: Does the question ask you for the specific cards of B,C or D? Do you need to know them?
6 December 2021, 1:49 amJonathan Kariv:
I get that A has 1,8 and 9.
6 December 2021, 3:57 amBlazer:
Can someone post a link with the full solution? I just don’t get it. (Please no email, it’s a 10minutemail…)
6 December 2021, 5:01 amCristóbal Camarero:
A has the cards 1, 8, and 9. They key point is to see who has the 12 card.
Blaine, I have checked all the possibilities and none of them has that MD5 hash. Using this (plus trying adding newlines and similar):
6 December 2021, 7:03 am“`bash
for a in $(seq 10)
do
for b in $(seq $a 11)
do
for c in $(seq $b 12)
do
suma=$(echo “$a,$b,$c” | md5sum)
echo $a,$b,$c,$suma
done
done
done
“`
L33tminion:
Explanation here, linked to avoid spoilers.
Re the comment above, echo adds a newline by default, you get the expected hash with `echo -n “$a,b,$c” | md5sum`.
6 December 2021, 4:09 pmL33tminion:
That link didn’t seem to come out correctly, should be this.
6 December 2021, 4:11 pmBlaine:
No newlines… try this link https://www.md5hashgenerator.com/
7 December 2021, 12:34 amTR:
Extension: Instead, D says “the sum of my cards is the number of a card that one of you is holding” will determine everyone’s cards.
Likewise (but a different solution) if D said “the sum of my cards is equal to the product of someone else’s cards.”
9 December 2021, 1:12 pmCristóbal Camarero:
Right, I missed the implicit newline of `echo`. Apologies for the noise.
12 December 2021, 12:26 pmYusuke Tsutsumi:
Here’s another explanation of the solution if anyone is interested: https://y.tsutsumi.io/puzzles/four-wizards
5 January 2022, 11:52 pm