Its something that each of us devours,
Not just us but birds, beats, trees, and flowers,
Frets iron and nibbles steel,
Toil hard stones to meal,
Exterminates king, collapse town,
And blows the mountains down.
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?
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.