How old is your son? asked a man to his neighbour. My son is five times as old as my daughter and my wife is five times as old as my son. I am twice as old as my wife whereas my grandmother, who is celebrating her eighty-first birthday is as old as all of us put together.
This is a most unusual paragraph. How quickly can you find out what is so unusual about it? It looks so ordinary, you'd think nothing was wrong with it. Actually, nothing IS wrong with it. But it is not as ordinary as you might think. If you think about it for a bit, you will find out why it is truly so unusual. So what is it? What is so unordinary about this paragraph?
I am first found in caves, now prolific online; I am a depiction, a drawing, a symbol, or sign. I will convey whichever mood you could wish; or for that matter, a fist, flask, or fish. What am I?
There is a straight highway. Four different villages lie on that highway. The distance between them is different. The third village is 60km away from the first village; the fourth is 40 km away from the second; the third is 10 km near to the fourth that it is to the second.
Can you calculate the distance between the fourth and the first village ?
There are two beautiful yet remote islands in the South Pacific. The Islanders born on one island always tell the truth, and the Islanders from the other island always lie.
You are on one of the islands and meet three Islanders. You ask the first which island they are from in the most appropriate Polynesian tongue, and he indicates that the other two Islanders are from the same island. You ask the second Islander the same question, and he also indicates that the other two Islanders are from the same island.
Can you guess what the third Islander will answer to the same question?
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.
