The change-making problem for six coin values and beyond
Abstract
The change-making problem asks: given a positive integer and a collection of integer coin values , what is the minimum number of coins needed to represent with coin values from ? For some coin systems , the greedy algorithm finds a representation with a minimum number of coins for all . We call such coin systems orderly. However, there are coin systems where the greedy algorithm fails to always produce a minimal representation. Over the past fifty years, progress has been made on the change-making problem, including finding a characterization of all orderly coin systems with 3, 4, and 5 coin values. We characterize orderly coin systems with 6 coin values, and we make generalizations to orderly coin systems with coin values.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2303.00078,
title = {The change-making problem for six coin values and beyond},
author = {Cornelia A. Van Cott and Qiyu Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.00078},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
25 pages. v2 incorporates referee suggestions, including a final section that discusses open problems