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Splitting 100 coins into piles to maximise product

Question

Divide 100100 pennies into any number of piles of any sizes; your reward is the product of the pile sizes (e.g. piles of 10,20,7010,20,70 pay 1400014000). The best possible reward can be written as a⋅bca\cdot b^c with aa and bb coprime. Compute abcabc.

Short answer

384384. Any pile of 55 or more is beaten by splitting it, and 2+2+22+2+2 is beaten by 3+33+3, so the optimum uses as many 33s as possible. Since 100=32⋅3+4100=32\cdot3+4, the maximum is 4⋅3324\cdot3^{32}, giving abc=4⋅3⋅32=384abc=4\cdot3\cdot32=384.

Adapted from QuantQuestions.io; question and answer rewritten by SelfMadeQuant.com.

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