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.
In the image below, you can see two glasses and two matchsticks.You need to move four matchsticks in such a manner that the crosses come inside the glasses. Note: you cannot move the crossed.
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.
A beggar on the street can make one cigarette out of every 6 cigarette butts he finds. After one whole day of searching and checking public ashtrays the beggar finds a total of 72 cigarette butts. How many cigarettes can he make and smoke from the butts he found?
In a guessing game, five friends had to guess the exact numbers of apples in a covered basket.
Friends guessed 22, 24, 29, 33, and 38, but none of the guesses was correct. The guesses were off by 1, 8, 6, 3, and 8 (in random order).
Can you determine the number of apples in a basket from this information?
There once were seven dwarfs who were all brothers. They were all born two years apart. The youngest dwarf is seven years old. How old is his oldest brother?
There is a circular car race track of 10km. There are two cars, Car A and Car B. And they are at the exact opposite end to each other. At Time T(0), Both cars move toward each other at a constant speed of 100 m/seconds. As we know both cars are at the same speed they will always be the exact opposite to each other.
Note, at the center, there is a bug which starts flying towards Car A at time T(0). When the bug reaches car B, it turns back and starts moving towards the car A. The speed of bug is 1m/second. After 5 hours all three stop moving.
What is the total distance covered by the bug?
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.
