The use of computers in the finance industry has been marked with controversy lately as programmed trading -- designed to take advantage of extremely small fluctuations in prices -- has been outlawed at many Wall Street firms. The ethics of computer programming is a fledgling field with many thorny issues.
Arbitrage is the trading of one currency for another with the hopes of taking advantage of small differences in conversion rates among several currencies in order to achieve a profit. For example, if $1.00 in U.S. currency buys 0.7 British pounds currency, ?1 in British currency buys 9.5 French francs, and 1 French franc buys 0.16 in U.S. dollars, then an arbitrage trader can start with $1.00 and earn 1 * 0.7 * 9.5 * 0.16 = 1.064 dollars thus earning a profit of 6.4 percent.
You will write a program that determines whether a sequence of currency exchanges can yield a profit as described above.
To result in successful arbitrage, a sequence of exchanges must begin and end with the same currency, but any starting currency may be considered.