In a rainy season, one day 3 huge ladies walked under a normal-sized umbrella.
The umbrella is not huge enough to accommodate all 3 ladies yet not a single lady got wet. Why?
I am working in a bus company. The company recently went under expansion and therefore there was not enough room for all the buses. As a result, twelve buses had to be stored outside.
If the company decides to expand the garage space by forty percent, enough space to accommodate the current buses will be created leaving enough space for twelve more buses if the need arises in future.
Can you calculate the number of buses that the company owns at present?
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.
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.
