Took me 3 or 4 days, maybe twenty minutes of staring at number copied into notepad each time and getting nowhere. My wife (the evil English major listed below) put me out of my misery by pointing out that looking at actual dice would help.
It's a neat problem, because there are so many "search spaces" for the answer. Does the order of dice matter ? How does the answer always come out odd, even or zero ?
I made what I'm sure is the common mistake of trying to devise an algorithm that included *all* the dice, although I couldn't see how that would guarantee an even/zero outcome set.
The professional thinker Edward deBono wrote about a training scenario for kids where he asked them to get across a room using two wooden planks and a rope. Most of the kids rigged up skis of some sort, using both planks to slowly cross the room. One child used just *one* plank and used the rope to "hop" across the room in just a few seconds. By not restricting his options to "must use all of the equipment provided", he came up with a better solution.
I think this problem is a very good example of that kind of thinking. Thanks for the reminder
