Three people enter a room and have a green or blue hat placed on their heads. They cannot see their own hat but can see the other hats.
The colour of each hat is purely random. They could all be green, blue, or any combination of green and blue.
They need to guess their own hat colour by writing it on a piece of paper, or they can write 'pass'.
They cannot communicate with each other in any way once the game starts. But they can have a strategy meeting before the game.
If at least one of them guesses correctly they win $10,000 each, but if anyone guesses incorrectly they all get nothing.
What is the best strategy?
You want to boil a two-minute egg. If you only have a three-minute timer (hourglass), a four-minute timer and a five-minute timer, how can you boil the egg for only two minutes?
It spends most of its day eating white, but when it’s quick enough, it gets to eat fruit and sometimes some blue things. It’s in a dark room, where the walls are blue, it runs from a ghost that roams the halls and haunts it all the time. What is it?
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.
