Le Monde puzzle [#958]

(This article was originally published at R – Xi'an's Og, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)

A knapsack Le Monde mathematical puzzle:

Given n packages weighting each at most 5.8kg for a total weight of 300kg, is it always possible to allocate these packages  to 12 separate boxes weighting at most 30kg each? weighting at most 29kg each?

This can be checked by brute force using the following R code

#generate packages
paca=runif(1,0,5.8)
while (sum(paca)<300){ 
  paca=c(paca,runif(1,0,5.8))} 
paca=paca[-length(paca)] 
paca=c(paca,300-sum(paca)) 

and

#check if they can be partitioned into 
#12 groups of weight less than 30 
box=vector(mode="list",length=12) 
#random allocation 
alloc=sample(1:12,length(paca),rep=TRUE) 
content=rep(0,12) 
for (i in 1:12){ 
box[[i]]=paca[alloc==i] 
content[i]=sum(box[[i]])} 
content=content*(content>0) 
#wrong allocation 
 while (max(content)>30){
  i=sample(1:12,1,prob=content)
  j=sample(1:length(box[[i]]),1,prob=box[[i]])
#reallocation
  k=sample(1:12,1,prob=max(content)-content)
  while (k==i){
    k=sample(1:12,1,prob=max(content)-content)}
  content[i]=content[i]-box[[i]][j]
  content[i]=content[i]*(content[i]>0)
  content[k]=content[k]+box[[i]][j]
  box[[k]]=c(box[[k]],box[[i]][j])
  box[[i]]=box[[i]][-j]}

repeatedly and could not find an endless while loop. (Empty boxes sometimes lead to negative contents, hence my fix setting negative contents to zero.) But neither did I find an issue when the upper bound on the weight is 29kg… So it is either possible or rarely impossible! The R code immediately gets stuck when setting the bound at 25kg.

After reading the solution of April 13 in Le Monde, it appears that there is a counter example for the 29kg limit, namely 60 packages weighting 4.91kg plus one package weighting 5.4kg, since the first 60 packages fit inside 12 boxes and the last one is left out.

Please comment on the article here: R – Xi'an's Og

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