A Gem of a Puzzle
A known number of equally valued gems are stolen from a vault. A week later an accomplice is captured. A math savvy detective interrogates the thief as follows:
D: How many accomplices were there?
T: I will not answer that.
D: What happened to the gems?
T: We split them evenly.
D: You must be lying.
T: I admit, to avoid a fight in the getaway car I took a share valued 20% above each of the others’.
D: Thank you. You just gave me the answer to my first question.
How many gems were stolen?
2 Comments
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
4 accomplices and 5*N gems: 2*N gems for T, 1*N gem(s) for each of the others, where N is an integer > 0.
You should be able to come up with a specific number of gems. Note that to be more clear I edited as follows: “20 percent over the others’” changed to “20 percent over each of the others’”.