A thief is convicted in Mexico. He gets the death penalty. The judge allows him to say the last sentence to determine how the penalty will be carried out. If the thief lies, he will be hanged, if he speaks the truth he will be beheaded. The thief tells the last sentence and to everybody's surprise some minutes later he is set free because the judge cannot determine his penalty. What did the thief say?
Three cars are driving on a track that forms a perfect circle and is wide enough that multiple cars can pass anytime. The car that is leading in the race right now is driving at 55 MPH and the car that is trailing at the last is going at 45 MPH. The car that is in the middle is somewhere between these two speeds.
Right now, you can assume that there is a distance of x miles between the leading car and the middle car and x miles between the middle car and the last car and also, x is not equal to 0 or 1.
The cars maintain their speed till the leading car catches up with the last car and then every car stops. In this scenario, do you think of any point when the distance between any two pairs will again be x miles i.e. the pairs will be x distance apart at the same time ?
10 people came into a hotel with 9 rooms and each guest wanted his own room. The bellboy solved this problem.
He asked the tenth guest to wait for a little with the first guest in room number 1. So in the first room, there were two people. The bellboy took the third guest to room number 2, the fourth to number 3, ..., and the ninth guest to room number 8. Then he returned to room number 1 and took the tenth guest to room number 9, still vacant.
How can everybody have his own room?
our enemy challenges you to play Russian Roulette with a 6-cylinder pistol (meaning it has room for 6 bullets). He puts 2 bullets into the gun in consecutive slots, and leaves the next four slots blank. He spins the barrel and hands you the gun. You point the gun at yourself and pull the trigger. It doesn't go off. Your enemy tells you that you need to pull the trigger one more time, and that you can choose to either spin the barrel at random, or not, before pulling the trigger again. Spinning the barrel will position the barrel in a random position.
Assuming you'd like to live, should you spin the barrel or not before pulling the trigger again?
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.
