Sunday, August 31, 2008

Puzzle-5

An evil king has 1000 bottles of wine. A neighboring queen plots to kill the bad king, and sends a servant to poison the wine. The king's guards catch the servant after he has only poisoned one bottle. The guards don't know which bottle was poisoned, but they do know that the poison is so potent that even if it was diluted 1,000,000 times, it would still be fatal. Furthermore, the effects of the poison take one month to surface. The king decides he will get some of his prisoners in his vast dungeons to drink the wine. Rather than using 1000 prisoners each assigned to a particular bottle, this king knows that he needs to murder no more than 10 prisoners to figure out what bottle is poisoned, and will still be able to drink the rest of the wine in 5 weeks time. How does he pull this off?

Friday, August 22, 2008

Puzzle-4

You are given 2 eggs.You have access to a 100-storey building.

Eggs can be very hard or very fragile means it may break if dropped from the first floor or may not even break if dropped from 100 th floor.Both eggs are identical.You need to figure out the highest floor of a 100-storey building an egg can be dropped without breaking.

Now the question is minimum how many drops you need to make. You are allowed to break 2 eggs in the process.

Puzzle-3

You have five pirates, ranked from 5 to 1 in descending order. The top pirate has the right to propose how 100 gold coins should be divided among them. But the others get to vote on his plan, and if fewer than half agree with him, he gets killed. How should he allocate the gold in order to maximize his share but live to enjoy it?