Recently I enjoyed a Nexflix show, “Culinary Class Wars”. In round 4 of the show, there was a mission that each team ran a restaurant for 20 guests. Surely the team with the most revenue wins. Although each team served very nice and luxurious dishes, there must be only one winner. After the round ended, the revenues of each teams had been revealed. As the prices of each menu were also already disclosed, I thought I can find out how many dishes have been sold for each team and each menu.
There were 4 teams in all. Below is the name of each teams, their menus and their prices:
| Team | Menu |
|---|---|
| The Gazillionaire’s Exorbitant Diner | Truffle Gold Katsu (₩36,000) Lobster Mala Cream Jjamppong (₩42,000) Caviar Roe Bibimbap Heaven (₩58,000) |
| Triple Chinese Restaurant | Mala Cream Shrimp Dim sum (₩24,000) Flame-grilled Bulgogi Bao (₩22,000) Gochujang Butter Gnocchi with Roast Chicken (₩30,000) |
| Mister Jang (a Korean condiment) | Mister Jang‘s Ssamjang Pasta (₩13,900) Gochujang Butter Steak (₩34,000) Assorted Jeon with Caviar (₩26,000) |
| The Restaurant that TV Crews line up for | The Blue House Master Chef’s Tendon (₩22,000) Dongpo pork from Sung Si-kyung‘s Grab a Bite (₩24,000) Cooking Master Boy‘s Mapo tofu (₩20,000) |
And the revenues of each teams were as followings:
| Team | Revenue |
|---|---|
| The Gazillionaire’s Exorbitant Diner | ₩4,774,000 |
| Triple Chinese Restaurant | ₩2,220,000 |
| Mister Jang (a Korean condiment) | ₩1,498,100 |
| The Restaurant that TV Crews line up for | ₩1,348,000 |
Finally, the show also revealed the most sold dish: Mala Cream Shrimp Dim sum, which sold a total of 39 dishes.
Given all this information, a straightforward recursive algorithm could easily solve this problem. I wrote one with Python and the source code can be found from Gist. Unfortunately, an exact solution could not be found. However, I could retrieve quite reasonable candidates.
The most easy ones were the dishes of “Triple Chinese Restaurant”. As the show already revealed that Mala Cream Shrimp Dim sum has been sold a total of 39 dishes, there were only two unknowns. And there are only two possible combinations which can meet the given information. If I add an assumption that each guest tried to order each dish at least once, the highlighted combination would be the more possible one.
| Mala Cream Shrimp Dim sum | 39 | 39 |
| Flame-grilled Bulgogi Bao | 12 | 27 |
| Gochujang Butter Gnocchi with Roast Chicken | 34 | 23 |
Thanks to their unique prices, “The Gazillionaire’s Exorbitant Diner” also shows small numbers of possible combinations. With any combination, they sold every menu than 30 dishes. Some of them sold close enough to the most sold dish, Mala Cream Shrimp Dim sum. Although it is hard to choose one of these combinations as an answer, I would bet on the highlighted one. Because some of the guests especially loved the Jjamppong and the Katsu was less filmed than other dishes in the show.
| Truffle Gold Katsu | 31 | 37 | 38 |
| Lobster Mala Cream Jjamppong | 37 | 34 | 37 |
| Caviar Roe Bibimbap Heaven | 36 | 35 | 30 |
In case of “Mister Jang”, there can be 5 possibilities. Among those, the highlighted one is the only combination that all the menus sold evenly as best as possible. Note that there are menus that were not chosen by some guests.
| Mister Jang‘s Ssamjang Pasta | 19 | 19 | 19 | 39 | 39 |
| Gochujang Butter Steak | 8 | 21 | 34 | 9 | 22 |
| Assorted Jeon with Caviar | 37 | 20 | 3 | 25 | 8 |
Different to other teams, “The Restaurant that TV Crews line up for” has so many possible combinations that I cannot list all of them. There were 101 possible combinations! Sadly, there are no cases that every menu was served at least once for each guest. So it seems no use to choose one of those possible combinations.
Kirin's Technology Essay 