A man is walking down a road with a basket of eggs. As he
is walking he meets someone who buys one-half of his eggs
plus one-half of an egg.
He walks a little further and meets another person who buys
one-half of his eggs plus one-half of an egg.
After proceeding further he meets another person who buys
one-half of his eggs plus one half an egg. At this point, he
has sold all of his eggs, and he never broke an egg.
How many eggs did the man have to start with?
If you were to put a coin into an empty bottle and then insert a cork into the neck, how could you remove the coin without taking out the cork or breaking the bottle?
A thief enters a store and threatens the clerk, forcing her to open the safe. The clerk says, “The code for the safe is different every day, and if you hurt me you’ll never get the code.†But the thief manages to guess the code on his own. How did he do it?
I have a sore throat and a severe headache. I have four tablets with me that are identical to each other and they do not have any cover on them. There is no way I can identify which tablet serves what purpose. The only thing that I know is that two of these four tablets are for the throat and the remaining two are for the headache. To treat my condition, I must take 1 of each. What will I do now?
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.
