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Coconuts, Revisited: Input

The document describes a short story where 5 men and a monkey are shipwrecked on an island. Each night, one of the men would wake up and divide the coconuts into piles, leaving one extra for the monkey. This continued each night with a different man. In the morning, they divided the remaining coconuts evenly. The document asks how many coconuts they must have gathered originally for this scenario to work out evenly in the end. It then asks, given a number of coconuts, what is the maximum number of people and one monkey that could have gone through this same process.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
15 views1 page

Coconuts, Revisited: Input

The document describes a short story where 5 men and a monkey are shipwrecked on an island. Each night, one of the men would wake up and divide the coconuts into piles, leaving one extra for the monkey. This continued each night with a different man. In the morning, they divided the remaining coconuts evenly. The document asks how many coconuts they must have gathered originally for this scenario to work out evenly in the end. It then asks, given a number of coconuts, what is the maximum number of people and one monkey that could have gone through this same process.

Uploaded by

Hello mister
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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616 Coconuts, Revisited

The short story titled Coconuts, by Ben Ames Williams, appeared in the Saturday Evening Post on
October 9, 1926. The story tells about five men and a monkey who were shipwrecked on an island.
They spent the first night gathering coconuts. During the night, one man woke up and decided to take
his share of the coconuts. He divided them into five piles. One coconut was left over so he gave it to
the monkey, then hid his share and went back to sleep.
Soon a second man woke up and did the same thing. After dividing the coconuts into five piles,
one coconut was left over which he gave to the monkey. He then hid his share and went back to bed.
The third, fourth, and fifth man followed exactly the same procedure. The next morning, after they all
woke up, they divided the remaining coconuts into five equal shares. This time no coconuts were left
over.
An obvious question is “how many coconuts did they originally gather?” There are an infinite
number of answers, but the lowest of these is 3,121. But that’s not our problem here.
Suppose we turn the problem around. If we know the number of coconuts that were gathered, what
is the maximum number of persons (and one monkey) that could have been shipwrecked if the same
procedure could occur?

Input
The input will consist of a sequence of integers, each representing the number of coconuts gathered by
a group of persons (and a monkey) that were shipwrecked. The sequence will be followed by a negative
number.

Output
For each number of coconuts, determine the largest number of persons who could have participated in
the procedure described above. Display the results similar to the manner shown below, in the Sample
Output. There may be no solution for some of the input cases; if so, state that observation.

Sample Input
25
30
3121
-1

Sample Output
25 coconuts, 3 people and 1 monkey
30 coconuts, no solution
3121 coconuts, 5 people and 1 monkey

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