A bag contains 64 balls of eight different colours. There are eight of each colour (including red). What is the least number you would have to pick, without looking, to be sure of selecting 3 red balls?
You have 10 balls with you. A friend of yours out of nowhere asks you to place those ten balls in five lines such that each of the lines has exactly 4 balls on them. He needs to check your intelligence. Prove him by doing the task.
He digs out tiny caves and stores gold and silver in them. He also built bridges of silver and made crowns of gold. They are the smallest you could imagine. Sooner or later everybody needs his help, yet many people are afraid to let him help them. Who is he?
After teaching his class all about Roman numerals (X = 10, IX=9 and so on) the teacher asked his class to draw a single continuous line and turn IX into 6. The teacher's only stipulation was that the pen could not be lifted from the paper until the line was complete.
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.