# Digital Clock Brightness

My alarm clock has a typical 7-segment digital display showing hours and minutes.

Every lit segment is equally bright, and every unlit segment is equally dark. The separator (:) is always lit.

Assuming the clock uses 12-hour time without a leading zero for the hours, at what time does the overall brightness (i.e., the total number of lit segments) of the display change the most?

## 3 Answers

Logic behind the answer:

The biggest change in brightness is: 7->8 (+4), 0->1 (-4), 1->2 (+3), 6->7 (-3).
Changing time by "tens," the greatest increase is from :19->:20 (+4), which is better than any single digit change.
An hour change (:59->:00) results in +1 brightness, so it is "inefficient" to go down in brightness (change in a single digit, 6->7, is less than :19->:20, and going from 6:59->7:00, is only a change of (-1)). So we are looking for an increase in brightness.

So, without really looking at anything else, my initial guess is:

7:59->8:00

resulting in:

+5 brightness

Note:

There is no lateral thinking tag, but when the clock is at 8:08, unplugging it results in a change of (-20) which is a greater change than (+6).

Edit:

Nine is 6 digits, not 5 like I originally thought.

• That "initial guess" looks good, but the math is off...ROT13(qbhoyr-purpx gur erfhyg bs mreb gb bar naq svsgl-avar gb mreb) – zennehoy Oct 24 '18 at 11:35
• @zennehoy ROT13(vf avar 5 be 6 havgf)? – eye_am_groot Oct 24 '18 at 11:38
• ROT13(avar vf fvk frtzragf) – zennehoy Oct 24 '18 at 11:39
• @zennehoy ahh. I corrected – eye_am_groot Oct 24 '18 at 11:42
• Some googling later I found there actually are clocks with 5-segment nines... Can't remember ever having seen one in real though. Thanks for updating your answer! – zennehoy Oct 24 '18 at 11:46

The answer has already been given, but I show my approach how to get there, just a simple bash script brute-forcing all possibilities:

#!/bin/bash
brightness(){
local b=0 c
for ((c=0;c<$${#1};c++)); do case$${1:$$c:1} in 0) (( b+=6 )); ;; 1) (( b+=2 )); ;; 2) (( b+=5 )); ;; 3) (( b+=5 )); ;; 4) (( b+=4 )); ;; 5) (( b+=5 )); ;; 6) (( b+=6 )); ;; 7) (( b+=3 )); ;; 8) (( b+=7 )); ;; 9) (( b+=6 )); ;; esac done echo$$b
}
biggest_diff=0
bbefore=$$(brightness 1159) for h in {0..11}; do for m in {00..59}; do bnow=$$(brightness $$h$$m)
diff=$$(( bnow - bbefore )) if [$${diff#-} -ge $$biggest_diff ]; then biggest_diff=$${diff#-}
echo Diff: $$diff echo Time:$$h:$$m fi bbefore=$$bnow
done;
done


Calling it returns ...

./clock | tail -n2


Diff: 5
Time: 8:00

• +1 Nice one. Well, your script is short enough to not have side effects. Nevertheless, it would be nicer to declare function-wide variables local. Just write local c b=0 to declare c before the loop, and declare and assign c. – rexkogitans Oct 25 '18 at 7:01
• true, edited ... – pLumo Oct 25 '18 at 7:52

Well, it is

+5 brightness from:
7:59 to 8:00

Since:

total of 7:59 is 3 + 5 + 6 = 14
total of 8:00 is 7 + 6 + 6 = 19

• Correct! Here's an upvote, but I'll accept Greg's answer since he has more reasoning. – zennehoy Oct 24 '18 at 11:45
• Sure, no issue, he deserves it. I came to the answer using a computer :) – Ahmed Ashour Oct 24 '18 at 11:45