{"id":986,"date":"2010-07-02T17:58:20","date_gmt":"2010-07-02T17:58:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/mathriddles\/uncategorized\/hello-world-2\/"},"modified":"2025-01-27T09:41:32","modified_gmt":"2025-01-27T14:41:32","slug":"hello-world-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/mathriddles\/difficulty\/medium\/hello-world-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Pennies on a Table"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You pass away and, though you have not been a particularly bad person in life, you have not been a particularly good one either. Waiting in the reception room of hell, the devil comes out to meet you. &#8220;Well,&#8221; says the devil, &#8220;Since you have not been that bad, I am going to give you a chance to get out of here.&#8221; The two of you then enter another room off to the side of the reception. In the middle of the room is a giant circular table and next to the walls are many sacks of coins. The devil continues, &#8220;We are going to play a game. We will take turns putting coins down flat on the table. I will put down a coin and then you will put down a coin, and so on. The coins cannot overlap and they cannot hang over the edge of the table. The last person to put down a coin wins, or equivalently, the last person who can no longer put a coin down on the table loses. Since you have never played this game before, I will also let you decide if you want to play first.&#8221; Can you think of a winning strategy for the game?<\/p>\n<p>Problem (and phrasing) communicated by Justin Bledin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You pass away and, though you have not been a particularly bad person in life, you have not been a particularly good one either. Waiting in the reception room of hell, the devil comes out to meet you. &#8220;Well,&#8221; says the devil, &#8220;Since you have not been that bad, I am going to give you&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2861,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,14,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","category-general","category-medium"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/mathriddles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/mathriddles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/mathriddles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/mathriddles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2861"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/mathriddles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=986"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/mathriddles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/986\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1195,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/mathriddles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/986\/revisions\/1195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/mathriddles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/mathriddles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/mathriddles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}