4. 209 There are two small piles of bricks. If 100 bricks are taken from the first pile and placed in the second pile, then the second pile will be twice as large as the first pile. If a certain number of bricks are taken from the second pile and placed in the first pile, then the first pile will be six times the size of the second pile. What is the minimum number of bricks that could be in the first pile? And determine the number of bricks in the second pile at this time.
Solution
[Solution] Let represent the number of bricks in the first pile, and represent the number of bricks in the second pile. Let be the number of bricks transferred from the second pile to the first pile according to the problem's conditions. At this point, the following equations hold:
From (1), we get .
Substituting into (2), we get .
That is, .
Therefore, is a multiple of 4. Let , substituting into (3) we get
Thus,
The numbers are all natural numbers, so they should satisfy the inequalities:
Solving this system of inequalities, we get .
The value of decreases as increases, so the minimum value of is obtained when is at its maximum allowable value, which is . At this point, ; checking the values of obtained, we find that they satisfy all the conditions of the problem. Therefore, the minimum number of bricks in the first pile is 170, and at this time, the number of bricks in the second pile is 40.