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My friends Peter and Sam are excellent mathematicians and always think strictly logical. Yesterday I told them: "I have secretly chosen two integers $x$ and $y$ with $1\le x\le y\le 99$. I have told their sum $s=x+y$ to Sam and their product $p=xy$ to Peter." Then the following conversation developed.

  1. Peter said: I don't know the numbers.
  2. Sam said: I don't know the numbers.
  3. Peter said: I don't know the numbers.
  4. Sam said: I don't know the numbers.
  5. Peter said: I don't know the numbers.
  6. Sam said: I don't know the numbers.
  7. Peter said: I don't know the numbers.
  8. Sam said: I don't know the numbers.
  9. Peter said: I don't know the numbers.
  10. Sam said: I don't know the numbers.
  11. Peter said: I don't know the numbers.
  12. Sam said: I don't know the numbers.
  13. Peter said: I don't know the numbers.
  14. Sam said: I don't know the numbers.
  15. Peter said: Aha. Then I do know the numbers now.
  16. Sam said: Aha. Then I also know the numbers now.

What are the values of $x$ and $y$?


Bonus question: How does the answer change, if we replace the lower bound in "$1\le x\le y\le 99$" by the new lower bound "$66\le x\le y\le 99$"


Remark: This puzzle is a variation on Product and Sum, Variant 2a.

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  • $\begingroup$ I would be curious to see a generalized version of this puzzle... $\endgroup$
    – user20
    Feb 1, 2015 at 18:58

2 Answers 2

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I wrote a Ruby program to cut out the tedious manual work:

#!/usr/bin/ruby

range = [*1..99]

pairs = range.product(range).select{|x, y| x <= y }
pairs.map! {|x, y| [x, y, x+y, x*y] }

def getuniqs arr
    arr.group_by{|x| x }
       .map{|k, v| v.length == 1 ? k : nil }
       .compact
end

def dunno pairs, n
    uniqs = getuniqs pairs.map{|p| p[n] }
    pairs.reject{|pair| uniqs.index pair[n] }
end

def aha pairs, n
    uniqs = getuniqs pairs.map{|p| p[n] }
    pairs.select{|pair| uniqs.index pair[n] }
end

7.times {
    pairs = dunno pairs, 3  # peter
    pairs = dunno pairs, 2  # sam
}
pairs = aha pairs, 3

puts pairs.map{|x, y, s, p| "#{x}, #{y}" }

Results:

llama@llama:...Code/ruby/puzzling8440$ ./pro_sum.rb 
77, 84

The numbers are $77$ and $84$.

For the bonus: The results are exactly the same.

This uses the same strategy as the answer on Variant 2A.

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Scala solution:

https://ideone.com/X48DIB

case class State(a: Int, b: Int, sum:Int, prod:Int)

val allPossibleStates:Seq[State] = for {
  i <- 1 to 99;
  j <- i to 99
} yield State(i,j,i+j,i*j)

(1 to 7).foldLeft(allPossibleStates)( (states, _) =>  
  states
   .groupBy(_.prod).filter(_._2.size > 1).flatMap(_._2)
   .groupBy(_.sum).filter(_._2.size > 1).flatMap(_._2)
   .toSeq
).groupBy(_.prod).filter(_._2.size == 1).flatMap(_._2)   
 .map(println)
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