A bag contains 64 balls of eight different colours. There are eight of each colour (including red). What is the least number you would have to pick, without looking, to be sure of selecting 3 red balls?
A California farmer owns a beautiful pear tree. He supplies the fruit to a nearby grocery store. The store owner calls the farmer to see how much fruit is available for him to buy. The farmer knows the main trunk has 24 branches. Each branch has exactly 12 boughs and each bough has exactly 6 twigs. Since each twig bears one piece of fruit, how many plums will the farmer be able to deliver?
It spends most of its day eating white, but when it’s quick enough, it gets to eat fruit and sometimes some blue things. It’s in a dark room, where the walls are blue, it runs from a ghost that roams the halls and haunts it all the time. What is it?
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. How do you measure 45 minutes?
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.
