In a town, there are four houses located at different distances from each other. Following are the distances:
The third house is 60 meters apart from the first house.
The fourth house is 40 meters apart from the second house.
The third house is 10 meters nearer to the fourth house than it is to the second house.
Can you find out the distance between the fourth and the first house?
A dying old man wants to divide his entire land between his only two sons. Since his only wish is to treat them as equal as both of them have been too good to him, he wants to divide his land equally between them. The problem is that the land is significantly irregular in shape and thus there is no choice of cutting them into two equal halves.
Can you help him divide the land in a manner that both of his sons will be happy?
I ask Joseph to pick any 5 cards out of a deck with no Jokers.
He can inspect then shuffle the deck before picking any five cards. He picks out 5 cards then hands them to me (Jack can't see any of this). I look at the cards and I pick 1 card out and give it back to Joseph. I then arrange the other four cards in a special way, and give those 4 cards all face down, and in a neat pile, to Jack.
Jack looks at the 4 cards i gave him, and says out loud which card Joseph is holding (suit and number). How?
The solution uses pure logic, not sleight of hand. All Jack needs to know is the order of the cards and what is on their face, nothing more.
I am thinking of a five-digit number such that:
The first and last digits are the same, their submission is an even number and multiplication is an odd number and is equal to the fourth number. Subtract five from it and we obtain the second number. Then divide into exact halves and we get the 3rd number.
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.
