Advent Puzzles 2014: puzzle 2 solution

Advent puzzle 2: use all of 2, 12, 20 and 14, with any of + − × ÷ ( ), to make 2. (Puzzles 3 and 4 will be tweeted this afternoon.)

— Portsmouth MathsJam (@MathsJamPOR) December 4, 2014

$(20+12)\div(2+14)=2$
$(2+14)\div(20-12)=2$
$(20+12)\div2-14=2$
$(20\div2+14)\div12=2$
$(2\times14+12)\div20=2$
$(20-12)\times2-14=2$
$((20\times2)-12)\div14=2$
$20\div(2\times12-14)=2$

Author’s note: unfortunately I made an error in the output of a program I used to set this puzzle and the puzzle wasn’t as difficult as I had intended. There are many different solutions. Some are given above; there are probably other solutions too.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Enter your comment here...

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Email (required) (Address never made public)

Name (required)

Website

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out / Change )

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out / Change )

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out / Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Leave a Reply Cancel reply