3 Glasses and 10 Coins Puzzle

March 3, 2023

Solve the Puzzle of 3 Glasses and 10 Coins

You have 3 glasses and 10 coins. The objective is to distribute the ten coins amongst the three glasses such that each glass has an odd number of coins.

Solve the Puzzle of 3 Glasses and 10 Coins

You have 3 glasses and 10 coins. The objective is to distribute ten coins among the three glasses such that each and every glass has an odd number of coins.

Solution

Let us try to divide 10 into 3 parts. Following are the possible combinations:-

1 + 1 + 8
1 + 2 + 7
1 + 3 + 6
1 + 4 + 5
2 + 2 + 6
2 + 3 + 5
2 + 4 + 4
3 + 3 + 4

Now from this, we can see that there is no way we can divide 10 into three odd parts, as there will always be one even number. Therefore we cannot conventionally divide the coins into three odd parts.

However, interviewers ask questions like this to check a candidate’s capacity to think out of the box. This problem for instance although we cannot solve it conventionally we can do the following:-

Let us distribute the coins in the following way 5 : 3: 2, now we have odd numbers in the 1st and 2nd glass while the third glass has even.

Pick up the third glass and place it inside the 2nd glass. In this way, the 2nd and third glasses essentially become one and contain 5 coins which is an odd number.

This same solution also applies if we distribute the coins in a 7: 2: 1 ratio.

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