Two friends were stuck in a cottage. They had nothing to do and thus they started playing cards. Suddenly the power went off and Friend 1 inverted the position of 15 cards in the normal deck of 52 cards and shuffled it. Now he asked Friend 2 to divide the cards into two piles (need not be equal) with equal number of cards facing up. The room was quite dark and Friend 2 could not see the cards. He thinks for a while and then divides the cards in two piles.
On checking, the count of cards facing up is same in both the piles. How could Friend 2 have done it ?
Consider this: Arnold Schwarzenegger has a big one. Michael J. Fox has a small one. Prince doesn’t have one. The Pope has one but never uses it. Bill Clinton has one and uses it all the time. What is it?
A man lives on the fifteenth floor of an apartment building. Every morning he takes the elevator down to the lobby and leaves the building. In the evening, he gets into the elevator, and, if there is someone else in the elevator, or if it was raining that day, he goes back to his floor directly. Otherwise, he goes to the tenth floor and walks up five flights of stairs to his apartment. Can you explain why he does this?
In 2011, people playing Foldit, an online puzzle game about protein folding, resolved the structure of an enzyme that causes an Aids-like disease in monkeys. Researchers had been working on the problem for 13 years. The gamers solved it in three weeks.