"Now listen lads, its come to my notice that one of those louts in the upper forms has been selling the answer to the money problem for a rather large proportion of your lunch money, this wont work, we have ways of knowing if your answers are the result of your own independent thought or perhaps there has been a little help along the way. (thinks…I also heard in the staff room that this enterprising chap has been using the money to buy fags and is selling them at a huge profit round the back of the toilet block. I must find out who he is… he could be useful.)
That said lets get back to the Latin… The verb scrotata….scrota ..scrotas ..scrotum..socrotamus ..scrotatus…socrant."
I've had a fair go at this problem over the last couple of night watches. When Alex first mentioned it and later said he didn't know if it had an answer I thought the easiest way to solve the problem would be to show through simple maths that at some point there would be some thing which would be illegal and would be wrong for all cases.
I thought I had that and told Alex that there was no solution and went to bed. The next morning he told me that the emails had come in and there was a solution. I went through what I had done and found I hadn't carried one of the 10's across.
Bugger, I thought, I had better see if I sort this one out. I think I have but would like to know if there are more solutions. Here are the results. I have 8 solutions, the first 4 columns are the same for each group with the last column changing for each new solution of that group.
9675 4 9567 5 6 9456 7 9347
1086 6 1085 5 5 1084 4 1083
10761 0 10652 0 1 10540 1 10430 Good luck with it Cheers Pete