Some Alteryx fun - the King's quest

My son came from school today with a math challenge. I saw (and think understood) the mathematical solution. So I thought, this could be also possibly solved within Alteryx.

So here is the challenge:

It is the birthday of the king and therefore he will release some prisoners. The king has 1000 prisoners, everyone in a single cell.

He advised his guard to:

- go 1000 times along the cells

- in the first round the guard has to go to every cell, in the second round to every second cell, in the third round to every third cell and so on

- every time the guard comes to a cell, he has to turn the key (so lock or unlock the door)

- at the start all cells were locked

How many prisoners will be released after 1000 rounds?

Any ideas? - Have fun!

castle.pdf

Common Use Cases

Accepted answers

JohnJPS

Cool challenge! Very tricky. I came up with 31 unlocked cells. Pretty cool in Alteryx, to see the grid of actual lock toggles in partial results along the way.

Spoiler

KingsQuest.yxmd

DataBlender

This was fun! I also got the answer of 31.

Spoiler

I tried two methods. One was an iterative macro to simulate the guard going round 1000 times.

The other was to calculate the number of divisors for each number. Those with an even number of divisors would remain locked whilst those with an odd number would become unlocked.

KingsQuest.yxzp

MarqueeCrew

Hi @ulrich_schumann,

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Preparation-Blending/Challenge-5th-grade-math/m-p/3920#M596

A fun challenge for perfect squares like us 🤓

All comments

JohnJPS

Cool challenge! Very tricky. I came up with 31 unlocked cells. Pretty cool in Alteryx, to see the grid of actual lock toggles in partial results along the way.