labVIEW games

[altenbach]

• Take 10 glasses and mark the bottles in binary from 0..1024 until you run out of bottles.
• Mark 10 prisoners from 0..9. (OK, slighly more than a handful ;))
• Form each bottle place a drop in each glass where the binary representation corresponds to the bottle number (1=place a drop, 0=skip) until all bottles are processed.
• Let 10 prisoners drink one glass each.
• Arrange the prisoners after 20 hours in order.
• Assing dead=1, alive=0
• The bit pattern of dead/alive prisoners will tell you the poisoned bottle number.
• discard the poisoned bottle and start celebrating.

Message Edited by altenbach on 08-07-2009 08:18 AM

[Intaris]

Zactly.

[altenbach]

If everybody is lucky, bottle #0 was poisoned and nobody dies. 😉

[RavensFan]

But you only have a handful of prisoners.  That is 5.

Ten prisoners is two handfuls. 

[altenbach]

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Ravens Fan wrote:

But you only have a handful of prisoners.  That is 5.

Ten prisoners is two handfuls. 

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I guess it depends on the size of the hand. 🙂 For example a handful of rice is probably more than five grains, right? 😄

[muks]

10 prisoners(shane got it first) must sample the wine. Bonus points if you worked out a way to ensure than no more than 8 prisoners die.

Number all bottles using binary digits (altenbach got it). Assign each prisoner to one of the binary flags. Prisoners must take a sip from each bottle where their binary flag is set.

Here is how you would find one poisoned bottle out of eight total bottles of wine.

	Bottle 1	Bottle 2	Bottle 3	Bottle 4	Bottle 5	Bottle 6	Bottle 7	Bottle 8
Prisoner A		X		X		X		X
Prisoner B			X	X			X	X
Prisoner C					X	X	X	X

In the above example, if all prisoners die, bottle 8 is bad. If none die, bottle 1 is bad. If A & B dies, bottle 4 is bad.

With ten people there are 1024 unique combinations so you could test up to 1024 bottles of wine.

Each of the ten prisoners will take a small sip from about 500 bottles. Each sip should take no longer than 30 seconds and should be a very small amount. Small sips not only leave more wine for guests. Small sips also avoid death by alcohol poisoning. As long as each prisoner is administered about a millilitre from each bottle, they will only consume the equivalent of about one bottle of wine each.

Each prisoner will have at least a fifty percent chance of living. There is only one binary combination where all prisoners must sip from the wine. If there are ten prisoners then there are ten more combinations where all but one prisoner must sip from the wine. By avoiding these two types of combinations you can ensure no more than 8 prisoners die.

I should give it to shane and altenbach.....

[muks]

And this has been dubbed as world'd most difficult puzzle

Three gods A , B , and C are called, in some order, True, False, and Random. True always speaks truly, False always speaks falsely, but whether Random speaks truly or falsely is a completely random matter. Your task is to determine the identities of A , B , and C by asking three yes-no questions; each question must be put to exactly one god. The gods understand English, but will answer in their own language, in which the words for yes and no are “da” and “ja”, in some order. You do not know which word means which. 

And am yet to figure out the answer......

[muks]

This is a triangle game involving 10 pennies. The pennies are arranged to form a triangle. This is what the triangle would look like: (Each * represents one penny).

* * * *  1   2   3  4 
* * *     5   6   7  

* *       8   9    
*          10

You must change the direction of the point of the triangle by only moving 3 pennies.

Like this....

Message Edited by muks on 08-08-2009 01:31 PM

[tst]

Move two from the top line to the third line and the bottom one to the top.

How are these LabVIEW games, exactly?

[smercurio_fc]

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tst wrote:

How are these LabVIEW games, exactly?

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Maybe one can solve them when they get tired of LabVIEW programming? Don't know, beats me.