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Countdown is a popular numbers and letters quiz program on UK television. In one of the rounds, the contestants must use a range of basic arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) to make six seed numbers equal to a target number:
This Maple 11 worksheet automatically provides a solution for the numbers game after searching the solution space.
Seed and target numbers can be randomly generated or manually specified. If randomly generated, two seeds will be large numbers, with the remaining seeds small numbers. The worksheet halts execution as soon as the first solution is found (although there may be many other, possibly simpler, solutions). If the target cannot be found after searching the solution space, then the closest solution will be returned - this can take several minutes. |
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