An octopus has 8 legs. A hippogriff has 6 legs and 2 pairs of wings. A sphinx has 6 legs and one pair of wings. Now we have all 3 kinds and a total of 18 insects in a cage. We have a total of 118 legs and 20 pairs of wings. How many insects do we have of each kind?
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?
One day, all the courtiers from Akbar's court were gathered in the assembly hall when one of them told the Emperor that all his valuables had been stolen by a thief the previous night.
This shocked the Emperor to his core as the place where that courter stayed was the most secured in the kingdom. The Emperor thought that it is not at all possible for an outsider to enter into the courtier's house and steal the valuables. Only another courtier could commit this crime. He quickly called Birbal to identify the thief.
Birbal thought for a while and successfully solved the mystery by identifying the thief in just one statement.
What did Birbal say?
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.
