Copyright 2019-2025 Caleb Evans
Released under the MIT license

This project was inspired by a math problem posed to Parade magazine's Marilyn Vos Savant in November 2019:

In a contest, a friend guessed the exact number of coins in a jar: 1,692. She won all of the coins, which totaled $100.54. They consisted of pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. How many coins of each kind were in the jar?

Source: https://parade.com/951440/marilynvossavant/can-you-solve-this-coin-riddle/

This project serves as a generalized solver program given any number of coins and any dollar amount.

This project uses uv to manage the virtual environment and project dependencies. You can install it like so:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

uv sync

uv run -m coinproblem -c 1692 -a 100.54

• --total-coin-count / -c: The total number of coins (i.e. the coin count)
• --total-coin-amount / -a: the total dollar value of all coins combined (i.e. the coin amount)

The referee program accepts a variable number of executables that will be pit against each other. The referee program must be run as a module via the python -m command.

Please refer to the Player Program Specification to learn how to write your own player programs.

uv run -m coinproblem.referee ./coinproblem/my-player.py

• --timeout / -t (default: 10): The number of seconds each player will run before timing out
• --min-count / --min (default: 0): The minimum number of coins per coin type to be generated
• --max-count/ --max (default: 100): The maximum number of coins per coin type to be generated

uv run pytest --cov --cov-report=term-missing

To add additional test cases, please append an array of [penny, nickel, dime, quarter] counts to the JSON array in test_cases.json.