Dear problem solvers,

Wanting to include as many jury members as possible in the evaluation of team performance, and thus ensure the international aspect of our Brainfinity competition, our jury comprised members who were not physically present, but assigned their points from different parts of the world.

First they received the challenges from the organizers for evaluation, and then they watched live streams of all teams together with other visitors on our website, and awarded their points for team presentations based on it.

However, yesterday Brainfinity decided to take the lead and put us all in front of a serious challenge!

We encountered technical problems during the evaluation of the 6^th grade category, and who better to solve this issues but the best problem solvers – you! We are handing over this challenge to you, because we believe that it should be solved by all teams, not just the finalists.

What is it about?

An error occurred in the program for calculating points awarded by the jury in the yesterday’s Brainfinity finals. We will share the total number of points for the 6^th grade, as shown by the program, with you. We’ve organized the points in tabular form so you could take all parameters into account, and we changed the names of teams and jury members so everything would be anonymous, and your task is to identify the error.

Your first challenge is HERE .

Take a good look at the table with the total number of points for the 6^th grade as generated by the program yesterday. It is a program that has been tested repeatedly and never yielded an error before. We have learned an important life lesson – always expect the unexpected in life.

However, we do not despair! Instead, we have created a new Brainfinity challenge – find out what happened during point calculation for the 6^th grade and send your explanations to the following email: brainfinity@institut.edu.rs. We are open for all your ideas.

Everyone who attempts to solve this challenge will notice that (had the program worked correctly) we would have had a different winner and different teams in the first three positions in the category of the 6^th grade. What is obvious, though, is that all our finalists who competed yesterday in Belgrade were deservedly among the best problem solvers in Serbia. There is absolutely no doubt about that.

However, we have to apologize to all contestants from the 6^th grade for this misstep and to invite you to take part and demonstrate your problem-solving skills – advise us on the best course we should take and how to correct the error.

It should be noted that our yesterday’s winners for the 6^th grade (imagine that, the program failed us only when it came to adding up points for the 6^th grade) absolutely deserved their accolades, so, please, do not send us suggestions in the line of – the teams that won awards should return them – because such suggestions will not be taken into consideration at all.

Solutions to both challenges should be sent to: brainfinity@institut.edu.rs no later than Wednesday, June 10, with the subject of the email: Brainfinity finals problem solving.

We owe an apology to all sixth-graders and their teachers-mentors. But, problem solvers, you will agree that there is no unsolvable problem! Let’s solve this together!