December 3, 2012 in Thinking Analytically
Combination locks
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https://doi.org/10.1287/LYTX.2012.06.14
Many people store their valuables in home safes because they protect against burglaries and fires. They are a good place for storing insurance documents, car titles, cash and many other valuables.
Figure 1 shows six dials that are on the front of your home safe. In order to open the safe, you must set each of the dials to one number. When the correct number is selected for each dial, the safe will open. Unfortunately you have forgotten the combination. All you can remember is that the numbers on all of the dials summed to 419.
Question:
What numbers should you select in order to unlock the safe?
Send your answer to [email protected] by Jan. 7, 2013. The winner, chosen randomly from correct answers, will receive an “Analytics – Driving Better Business Decisions” T-shirt. Past questions can be found at puzzlor.com.
John Toczek is the AVP Predictive Modeling at Chubb in the Decision Analytics and Predictive Modeling department. He earned his BSc. in Chemical Engineering at Drexel University (1996) and his MSc. in Operations Research from Virginia Commonwealth University (2005).