Can anyone help me make sense of this brain teaser?

Can anyone here help me make sense of this brain teaser?

To summarize a dark lord has taken over the land and built his tower. Now he has to figure out who gets paid what from minions.

850 gold pieces to the Dragon Guardian and the Hellhound wrangler

1300 gold pieces to the Hellhound wrangler and magician architect

1000 gold pieces to the magician architect and the orc overseer

1900 gold pieces to the orc overseer and the master of slaves

3300 to the master of slaves and the conjuror of the demon hordes

2500 to the conjuror of demons and the Hellhound wrangler

What does each one charge for their services? That's it that's all the information it gives. Below I will list the answers and even with those I still can't retrace how they got those answers. I never claimed to be a math whiz though! If you know how they got it and can explain it I'd appreciate it.

Dragon Guardian 150
Hellhound Wrangler 700
Magician Architect 600
Orc overseer 400
Master of Slaves 1500
Conjuror of demons 1800

originally posted by: DetectiveT
Can anyone here help me make sense of this brain teaser?

To summarize a dark lord has taken over the land and built his tower. Now he has to figure out who gets paid what from minions.

850 gold pieces to the Dragon Guardian and the Hellhound wrangler

1300 gold pieces to the Hellhound wrangler and magician architect

1000 gold pieces to the magician architect and the orc overseer

1900 gold pieces to the orc overseer and the master of slaves

3300 to the master of slaves and the conjuror of the demon hordes

2500 to the conjuror of demons and the Hellhound wrangler

What does each one charge for their services? That's it that's all the information it gives. Below I will list the answers and even with those I still can't retrace how they got those answers. I never claimed to be a math whiz though! If you know how they got it and can explain it I'd appreciate it.

Dragon Guardian 150
Hellhound Wrangler 700
Magician Architect 600
Orc overseer 400
Master of Slaves 1500
Conjuror of demons 1800

Wait. Is this how Soros names the ranks of his minions?

Yeah, whoever wrote this had Lord of the Rings on the brain!
The opening paragraph talked about getting rid of the goody goody elves and hobbits. I didn't include because it offered nothing as far as clues go to the problem.

a reply to: DetectiveT

Something seems wrong with this

850 gold pieces to the Dragon Guardian and the Hellhound wrangler

2500 to the conjuror of demons and the Hellhound wrangler

Dragon Guardian 150
Hellhound Wrangler 700
Conjuror of demons 1800

But to be honest, i'm kinda stumped by the whole thing. I'm not sure where those numbers come from, it seems like there's some missing info.

a reply to: slatesteam

Sounds more like the KKK ranking system. Only the Grand Wizard of the Goblin order can figure this one out.

a reply to: dug88

Thank you! That's what I thought. You would need more information to make sense of it somehow. I get that maybe they are distributed with the totals they give in the first part but after that I got nothing. That is how it is written in the book .

I'm glad it's not just me and the answer was ridiculously simple.

a reply to: DetectiveT

I don't have time to sit down and do it, but it has to do with percentages. If you sat down and figured out how the percentages overlapped, you'd see how they arrived at the answers.

It's kind of a leap, really considering there are zero contextual clues.

The Dark lord would get paid from the minions and divide up the money wouldn't he? I would think that minions refers to the surfs or regular minion people of his kingdom. Now, if you add up all of those numbers, it comes out to ten thousand eight hundred fifty, and the answer only accounts for five thousand one hundred fifty, how can the answer be correct unless the dark lord doesn't know how to add or charges them income tax and social security on their earnings.

a reply to: DetectiveT
I'm struggling to see why Hellbound Wrangler appears to get paid 3 times while the others get 2.
How does that affect the expected total?

a reply to: Tulpa

That's part of how you get the answer, because then you know he has to make less than $850.00.

a reply to: Atsbhct

Should've stopped at "I'm struggling......"

originally posted by: Tulpa
a reply to: DetectiveT
I'm struggling to see why Hellbound Wrangler appears to get paid 3 times while the others get 2.
How does that affect the expected total?

He has to work three jobs to make a living wage, too many kids going college.

originally posted by: dug88
a reply to: DetectiveT

Something seems wrong with this

850 gold pieces to the Dragon Guardian and the Hellhound wrangler

2500 to the conjuror of demons and the Hellhound wrangler

Dragon Guardian 150
Hellhound Wrangler 700
Conjuror of demons 1800

But to be honest, i'm kinda stumped by the whole thing. I'm not sure where those numbers come from, it seems like there's some missing info.

I agree. Need another variable or two. Like what kind of dark lord? And what kind of land is it. Is there lumber and gold for harvesting? Did he have to put down a revolt to get it? Is there mutiny in his ranks? What are there HPs? Have they been taxed already and I’m not, why not? How much tax is too much? Can you provide a local fair or jousting tournament to boost morale and raise funds?

a reply to: DetectiveT

If i were the Dark Lord ....

Add up the given values.
Times by two.
Add 700 for the Hellbound Wranglers 3rd line and that should do it.

As Dark Lord MY WORD IS FINAL!

Is the dark lord actually orange, and built the Trump tower?

a reply to: Tulpa

If I were the Dark Lord I'd threaten them all with death for disobedience and keep the gold for myself. It's easier then doing the maths..

"I don't have time to sit down and do it, but it has to do with percentages. If you sat down and figured out how the percentages overlapped, you'd see how they arrived at the answers.

It's kind of a leap, really considering there are zero contextual clues."

Interesting. Gotta head out again. Duty calls but I will look into that when I get some down time.

originally posted by: DetectiveT
Can anyone here help me make sense of this brain teaser?

To summarize a dark lord has taken over the land and built his tower. Now he has to figure out who gets paid what from minions.

850 gold pieces to the Dragon Guardian and the Hellhound wrangler

1300 gold pieces to the Hellhound wrangler and magician architect

1000 gold pieces to the magician architect and the orc overseer

1900 gold pieces to the orc overseer and the master of slaves

3300 to the master of slaves and the conjuror of the demon hordes

2500 to the conjuror of demons and the Hellhound wrangler

What does each one charge for their services? That's it that's all the information it gives. Below I will list the answers and even with those I still can't retrace how they got those answers. I never claimed to be a math whiz though! If you know how they got it and can explain it I'd appreciate it.

Dragon Guardian 150
Hellhound Wrangler 700
Magician Architect 600
Orc overseer 400
Master of Slaves 1500
Conjuror of demons 1800

There are 6 equations with 6 unknowns (the unknowns being how much each character got paid). Any number of equations that contains the same number of unknowns can be solved algebraically for the variables as long as there aren’t any inconsistent in equations.

The easiest way to do that when the number of equations gets large (any thing over about 3) is to write the equations in the form of a matrix (in this case, 6 by 6) operating on a vector of the variables (in this case of length 6). Then you get the answer by a process called Gaussian elimination. It’s a problem in linear algebra.

en.wikipedia.org...

a reply to: DetectiveT

I know a nice new tower you can throw them off.

Although it might be more interesting (and Darker) to put 11,000 gold pieces up on the roof and get them to fight it out among themselves.

Not sure if it is the way its meant to be done, but the way I did it was this;

The Dragon Guardian and the Hellhound Wrangler are unique in that the Dragon Guardian has only 1 payment and the Wrangler has 3.

So I combined the income levels from the Hellhound Wrangler (850, 1,300, 2,500) giving me a total of 4,650.
I divided that number by the 3 payments to give me an average of 1,550.
Now I subtracted the payment of 850 that the Wrangler shared with the Dragon Guardian to give me a value of 700 per payment for the Wrangler. .: EDIT :. Deducting this value from the first payment will also give the 150 for the Dragon Guardian.

Then next was simple, take the shared payment between the Wrangler and the Magician of 1,300 and subtract the 700 payment value, giving us a payment value to the Magician of 600.

Then follow it through for the rest.

.: EDIT 2 :. This is NOT how it's done... Out of curiosity, I just plugged in a bunch of random numbers into my calculations and the numbers don't play out the same way. I guess I got lucky with the numbers used?
Or perhaps the way this maths works, is it needs to have very specific values in the given locations, otherwise, you can't use the same principles?
My bet is that I just got lucky with my calculations.

"1900 gold pieces to the orc overseer and the master of slaves"
"3300 to the master of slaves and the conjuror of the demon hordes"

Tells that conjuror of the demon hordes must be greater than 1400 for example.

"2500 to the conjuror of demons and the Hellhound wrangler"

tells Hellhound wrangler must be under 1100

Then spend hours going around and around until logic works out the final answer. Or find a prolog programer who could problaby write a program in a few minutes that derive the answer in a second.