There is a jar in which there are two types of candies.
20 blueberries and 16 strawberries. You perform the following steps:
1) You take out two candies.
2) If the two candies are of the same flavour, you add a blueberry one otherwise, you add the strawberry one.
You repeat these two steps till there is just one candy remaining in the jar. Which flavoured candy will be left?
A man died, leaving $10,000,000 for his widow, 5 sons and 4 daughters. Each daughter received an equal amount, each son received twice as much as a daughter, and the widow received three times as much as a son.
You walk into a room and see a bed. On the bed, there are two dogs, five cats, a giraffe, six cows, and a goose. There are also three doves flying above the bed. How many legs are on the floor?
Three men in a cafe order a meal the total cost of which is $15. They each contribute $5. The waiter takes the money to the chef who recognises the three as friends and asks the waiter to return $5 to the men.
The waiter is not only poor at mathematics but dishonest and instead of going to the trouble of splitting the $5 between the three he simply gives them $1 each and pockets the remaining $2 for himself.
Now, each of the men effectively paid $4, the total paid is therefore $12. Add the $2 in the waiters pocket and this comes to $14. Where has the other $1 gone from the original $15?
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.
