John is on an island and there are three crates of fruit that have washed up in front of him. One crate contains only apples. One crate contains only oranges. The other crate contains both apples and oranges.
Each crate is labelled. One reads 'apples', one reads 'oranges', and one reads 'apples and oranges'. He know that NONE of the crates have been labeled correctly - they are all wrong.
If he can only take out and look at just one of the pieces of fruit from just one of the crates, how can he label all of the crates correctly?
You have two strings whose only known property is that when you light one end of either string it takes exactly one hour to burn. The rate at which the strings will burn is completely random and each string is different.
You are confined in a room and given two metal rods. Out of these two rods, one is magnet and the other is the iron rod. They look starkly similar. You don't have any other metal object in the room.
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.
