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.
If two fifty-foot ropes are suspended from a forty-foot ceiling that is twenty feet apart, how much rope will you be able to steal if you have a knife?
A thief enters a store and threatens the clerk, forcing her to open the safe. The clerk says, “The code for the safe is different every day, and if you hurt me you’ll never get the code.†But the thief manages to guess the code on his own. How did he do it?
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.
