Splitting 100 coins into piles to maximise product
Question
Divide pennies into any number of piles of any sizes; your reward is the product of the pile sizes (e.g. piles of pay ). The best possible reward can be written as with and coprime. Compute .
Short answer
. Any pile of or more is beaten by splitting it, and is beaten by , so the optimum uses as many s as possible. Since , the maximum is , giving .
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