How many people must be gathered together in a room, before you can be certain that there is a greater than 50/50 chance that at least two of them have the same birthday?
A woman is sitting in her hotel room and hears a knock at the door. She opens the door to see a man whom she’s never met before. He says, “I’m sorry, I have made a mistake, I thought this was my room.†He then goes down the corridor and into the elevator. The woman goes back into her room and calls security. What made the woman so suspicious of the man?
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.
