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Coin Stack Manipulation (Posted on 2025-05-17) Difficulty: 4 of 5
There are 1001 stacks of coins S1, S2, ..., S1001. Initially, stack Sk has k coins for each k = 1,2, ...,1001. In an operation, one selects an ordered pair (i,j) of indices i and j satisfying 1 ≤ i < j ≤ 1001 subject to two conditions:

The stacks Si and Sj must each have at least 1 coin.
The ordered pair (i,j) must not have been selected before. Then, if Si and Sj have a coins and b coins respectively, one removes gcd(a,b) coins from each stack.

What is the maximum number of times this operation could be performed?

No Solution Yet Submitted by Danish Ahmed Khan    
Rating: 5.0000 (1 votes)

Comments: ( You must be logged in to post comments.)
  Subject Author Date
Hints/TipsAn upper bound and a possible solutionSteve Herman2025-05-17 16:01:10
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