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Take Temporal Difference, Get Maximum (Posted on 2023-04-25) Difficulty: 3 of 5
• Amber timed how long she took to solve a monthly mathematical contest. She writes down the elapsed time in DD:HH:MM:SS format and also in seconds.

• For example, if she spent 1,000,000 seconds, she would write down 11:13:46:40 and 1,000,000.

Amber shares her numbers with Bryce. Bryce subtracts her two numbers (higher one minus the lower one), ignoring punctuations. In this case Bryce would obtain:

• 11134640 - 1000000 = 10134640

Determine the maximum value of the positive integer that must always divide his result.
Explain your answer with valid arguments.

See The Solution Submitted by K Sengupta    
Rating: 5.0000 (1 votes)

Comments: ( Back to comment list | You must be logged in to post comments.)
Solution solution Comment 1 of 1
D = 86400  (# seconds in a day)
H = 3600
M = 60
S = 1

If there are s seconds, Amber's number is just s.
Using the format,
Bryce's number is 1000000*d + 10000*h + 100*m + s
Amber's number is   86400*d +  3600*h +  60*m + s

The difference is: 913600*d + 6400*h + 40*m
Since 40 divides the other coefficients, answer = 40

A program to confirm started with random integer values for d,h,m,s, then calculated the difference, computed the factors of the difference then used the intersection of sets to find the factors in common, which were:
[2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 20, 40]   (output of program below)

-----
import random

def factors(n):
    """  for integer n, return a list of all the factors including or not 1 and n """
    ans = [1,n]
    ans = []
    for i in range(2,2+int(n**.5)):
        if n%i == 0:
            ans.append(i)
            ans.append(int(n/i))
    return sorted(ans)

def seconds(d,h,m,s):
    return 86400*d + 3600*h + 60*m + s

def no_colons(d,h,m,s):
    return 1000000*d + 10000*h + 100*m + s

def diff(d,h,m,s):
    return  913600*d + 6400*h + 40*m

for i in range(50):
    if i == 0:
        incommon = set(factors(diff(25,15,33,10)))
    d = random.randint(0,30)
    h = random.randint(0,23)
    m = random.randint(0,59)
    s = random.randint(0,59)
    difference = diff(d,h,m,s)
    totalSeconds = seconds(d,h,m,s)
    if totalSeconds < 1000000:
        continue
    myfactors = set(factors(diff(d,h,m,s)))
    incommon = incommon.intersection(myfactors)
print(sorted(list(incommon)))


  Posted by Larry on 2023-04-25 06:55:54
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