You are a prisoner sentenced to death. The Emperor offers you a chance to live by playing a simple game. He gives you 50 black marbles, 50 white marbles, and 2 empty bowls. He then says, 'Divide these 100 marbles into these 2 bowls. You can divide them any way you like as long as you use all the marbles. Then I will blindfold you and mix the bowls around. You then can choose one bowl and remove ONE marble. If the marble is WHITE you will live, but if the marble is BLACK... you will die.'
How do you divide the marbles up so that you have the greatest probability of choosing a WHITE marble?
At the local model boat club, four friends were talking about their boats.
There were a total of eight boats, two in each colour, red, green, blue and yellow. Each friend owned two boats. No friend had two boats of the same colour.
Alan didn't have a yellow boat. Brian didn't have a red boat but did have a green one. One of the friends had a yellow boat and a blue boat and another friend had a green boat and a blue boat. Charles had a yellow boat. Darren had a blue boat, but didn't have a green one.
Can you work out which friend had which coloured boats?
The day before the 1996 U.S. presidential election, the NYT Crossword contained the clue “Lead story in tomorrow’s newspaper,” the puzzle was built so that both electoral outcomes were correct answers, requiring 7 other clues to have dual responses.
