10 people came into a hotel with 9 rooms and each guest wanted his own room. The bellboy solved this problem.
He asked the tenth guest to wait for a little with the first guest in room number 1. So in the first room, there were two people. The bellboy took the third guest to room number 2, the fourth to number 3, ..., and the ninth guest to room number 8. Then he returned to room number 1 and took the tenth guest to room number 9, still vacant.
How can everybody have his own room?
Assume there are approximately 5,000,000,000 (5 billion) people on Earth. What would you estimate to be the result, if you multiply together the number of fingers on every person's left hand? (For the purposes of this exercise, thumbs count as fingers, for five fingers per hand.) If you cannot estimate the number then try to guess how long the number would be.
You are stuck on an island where you have nothing. You find four pieces of paper somewhere on the island. What will be your strategy to escape from the island safely?
PS: No other resource is available to you on the island, neither can you build anything.
It can't be seen, can't be felt, can't be heard, and can't be smelt.
It lies behind stars and under hills, And empty holes it fills.
It comes first and follows after, Ends life, and kills laughter.
What is 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.
