One absent-minded ancient philosopher forgot to wind up his only clock in the house. He had no radio, TV, telephone, internet, or any other means for telling time. So he travelled on foot to his friend's place a few miles down the straight desert road. He stayed at his friend's house for the night and when he came back home, he knew how to set his clock. How did he know?
Your last good ping-pong ball fell into a narrow metal pipe embedded one foot deep in concrete.
How can you get it out undamaged, if all the tools you have are your tennis paddle, shoe laces, and plastic water bottle, which does not fit into the pipe?
In a science lab, a petri dish hosts a healthy colony of yeast for an experiment. Now every minute, all the yeast cells divide into two. At noon, there was just a single cell of yeast and at 1:22, the Petri dish was half full. Can you calculate when the dish will be full of yeast?
I inserted a coin in a bottle and closed its mouth with the help of a cork. Now, I was able to take the coin out from the bottle without taking out the cork or breaking the bottle. Can you tell me how I did it?
A chess tournament is taking place on knock-out terms (the one who loses the match is out of the game).
(a) If 10 matches are played in total, how many players participated?
(b) If 20 players took part in the tournament, how many matches were played?
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.
