Revealed: How to be a top banana and solve GCHQ spy chiefs’ fruit bowl brainteaser
- GCHQ said the fruit bowl puzzle had to be coloured using just four colours
- The test was designed to illustrate the four-colour theorem developed in 1852
- GCHQ hope the puzzle will help inspire a new generation of codebreakers
According to GCHQ, the fruit bowl puzzle – completed below– had to be coloured using just four colours so that the pear is green, the orange is orange, the apple red and the banana yellow.
The test was designed to illustrate the four-colour theorem developed in 1852 by Francis Guthrie, who noticed that no more than four colours are needed to fill in any map, so no two adjacent regions are the same colour.
It became the first major theorem to be proved using a computer.
It is one of the puzzles in a new children’s book which spy chiefs hope will inspire codebreakers of the future to join GCHQ.
The GCHQ fruit bowl puzzle was designed to illustrate the four-colour theorem developed in 1852 by Francis Guthrie, who noticed that no more than four colours are needed to fill in any map, so no two adjacent regions are the same colour
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