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ASKING QUESTIONS TO DETERMINE THE PRODUCT OF CIRCULARLY ARRANGED NUMBERS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 April 2021

SHARAD S. SANE*
Affiliation:
Chennai Mathematical Institute, Chennai603103, India e-mail: sharadsane@gmail.com
*

Abstract

Fix positive integers k and n with $k \leq n$ . Numbers $x_0, x_1, x_2, \ldots , x_{n - 1}$ , each equal to $\pm {1}$ , are cyclically arranged (so that $x_0$ follows $x_{n - 1}$ ) in that order. The problem is to find the product $P = x_0x_1 \cdots x_{n - 1}$ of all n numbers by asking the smallest number of questions of the type $Q_i$ : what is $x_ix_{i + 1}x_{i + 2} \cdots x_{i+ k -1}$ ? (where all the subscripts are read modulo n). This paper studies the problem and some of its generalisations.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2021 Australian Mathematical Publishing Association Inc.

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