Three legendary knights are fighting against a multiheaded dragon. Whenever the first knight attacks, he cuts off half of the current number of heads plus one more. Whenever the second knight attacks, he cuts off one third of the current number of heads plus two more. Whenever the third knight attacks, he cuts off one fourth of the current number of heads plus three more. They repeatedly attack in an arbitrary order so that at each step an integer number of heads is being cut off. If all the knights cannot attack as the number of heads would become non-integer, the dragon eats them. Will the knights be able to cut off all the dragon’s heads if it has $41!$ heads? Alexey Zaslavsky
Problem
Source: Tournament of Towns, Junior A-Level Paper, Spring 2020 , p2
Tags: number theory, factorial, combinatorics, game