Paying homage to our fondness of brain-teasers, every month we post a new challenge created by the Forensic Technology team, focusing on logical, analytical and coding problems.

Analysing data for patterns/trends is an important part of what we do in Forensic Technology. With this in mind we have returned to our programming roots for this month’s challenge. Can you write a script to solve the below…?

i) What are the factors of 379065191139531?

ii) What connects 35432488 with these numbers: 806095675586097, 7405814774826 and 379065191139531

We’ll be posting our Python based solution next month at which point we will bid you farewell for the year. We hope to be back next year with more puzzles but in a different format so make sure you keep an eye out for our return!

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What's the answer?

For the final time this year we present our solution to the challenge we have set you:

i) Below is the code we used in Python 3.5 to calculate the factors of 379065191139531:

ii) As alluded to in part i) the first step to solving ii) is to get the factors of 806095675586097, 7405814774826 and 379065191139531. The next part is not so obvious. First we need the common factors of the 3 numbers we were just looking at. Then with some outside-the-box thinking we sum over these common factors to arrive at 35432488.

The code to do this is below:

We hope to be back next year bigger and better so keep a look out for future posts.