It would be a royal pain not to know the answer to this puzzler in a job interview!
Question:
This is an absolute classic. A king demands a tax of 1,000 gold sovereigns from each of 10 regions of his nation. The tax collectors for each region bring him the requested bag of gold coins at year end. An informant tells the king that one tax collector is cheating and giving coins that are consistently 10% lighter than they should be, but he does not know which collector is cheating. The king knows that each coin should weigh exactly one ounce. How can the king identify the cheat by using a weighing device exactly once?
Answer:
The king should take one coin from bag one, two coins from bag two, three coins from bag three, and so on, finishing with ten coins from bag ten. Place this collection on the weighing device, and look for the discrepancy from 1+2+3+…+10 ounces. If the actual weight is .40 ounces short, for example then bag four is light, and collector four is the cheat.
Special thanks for this interview question to Timothy Crack, author of Heard on the Street: Quantitative Questions from Wall Street Job Interviews.
{ 2 comments }
USe different number of coins from each region and weigh them together.
The assumptions that make the answer valid if there is only one weighing trial are:
one tax collector per region and every coin in the cheat bag is consistently 10 % lighter.
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