SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

  Puzzle 32: The Magic Money Machine

 

The wizards at Wall Street are up to it again. The Silverbags investment bank has invented the following machine. The machine consists of 6 boxes numbered 1 to 6. When you first get the machine, it contains 6 tokens, one in each box. You have two buttons A, B on the machine and you can press them as many times as you like and in any order.

Button A Choose a number i from 1 to 5 and then take one token from box i and magically two tokens will be added to box i + 1.

Button B Choose a number i from 1 to 4 and then take one token from box i and then the contents of boxes i + 1 and i + 2 will be interchanged.

The machine sells for one trillion dollars. The contract says that you can take the machine back to the bank at any time and then the bank will give you one dollar for each token in the machine. Is the machine worth buying?

  Solution

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