English

Chameleon Coins

History and Overview 2015-12-24 v1

Abstract

We discuss coin-weighing problems with a new type of coin: a chameleon. A chameleon coin can mimic a fake or a real coin, and it can choose which coin to mimic for each weighing independently. We consider a mix of NN coins that include exactly two non-real coins: one fake and one chameleon. The task is to use a balance to find two coins one of which has to be fake. We find bounds for the number of coins for which we can find a solution in a given number of weighings. We also introduce an important idea of solution scaling.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1512.07338,
  title  = {Chameleon Coins},
  author = {Tanya Khovanova and Konstantin Knop and Oleg Polubasov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1512.07338},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

27 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T12:16:25.773Z