You are a cab driver who pools passengers. You pick 3 people from a destination and drop 1 after an hour. 2 people climb aboard at the same time and you drop 3 at the next destination. After some time, you pick 2 passengers only to drop 1 after a short distance where 3 more passengers climb up the cab. You leave the rest of the passengers one by one to their destination and then come back home.
You stand in front of two doors. A guard stands next to each door. You know the following things: one path leads to paradise, the other leads to death. You cannot distinguish between the two doors. You also know that one of the two guards always tells the truth and the other always lies. You have permission to ask one guard one question to discover which door leads to paradise. What one question would you ask to guarantee you enter the door to paradise?
Here is what you have to do. You have to throw a ball as hard as you can but it must return back to you even if it does not bounce at anything. Also, you have nothing attached to the ball. There is no one on the other end to catch that ball and throw it back at you.
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.
