Best long difficult riddles

logicmath

A women walks into a bank to cash out her check. By mistake the bank teller gives her dollar amount in change, and her cent amount in dollars. On the way home she spends 5 cents, and then suddenly she notices that she has twice the amount of her check. How much was her check amount?
The check was for dollars 31.63. The bank teller gave her dollars 63.31 She spent .05, and then she had dollars 63.26, which is twice the check. Let x be the dolars of the check, and y be the cent. The check was for 100x + y cent He was given 100y + x cent Also 100y + x - 5 = 2(100x + y) Expanding this out and rearranging, we find: 98y = 199x + 5 Which doesn't look like enough information to solve the problem except that x and y must be whole numbers, so: 199x ≡ -5 (mod 98) 98*2*x + 3x ≡ -5 (mod 98) 3x ≡ -5 ≡ 93 (mod 98) This quickly leads to x = 31 and then y = 63 Alternative solution by substitution: 98y = 199x + 5 y = (199x + 5)/98 = 2x + (3x + 5)/98 Since x and y are whole numbers, so must be (3x + 5)/98. Call it z = (3x+5)/98 so 98z = 3x + 5, or 3x = 98z - 5 or x = (98z - 5)/3 or x = 32z-1 + (2z-2)/3. Since everything is a whole number, so must be (2z-2)/3. Call it w = (2z-2)/3, so 3w = 2z-2 so z = (3w+2)/2 or z = w + 1 + w/2. So w/2 must be whole, or w must be even. So try w = 2. Then z = 4. Then x = 129. Then y = 262. if you decrease y by 199 and x by 98, the answer is the same: y = 63 and x = 31.
72.45 %
65 votes
logicstoryclever

You've been placed on a course of expensive medication in which you are to take one tablet of Plusin and one tablet of Minusin daily. You must be careful that you take just one of each because taking more of either can have serious side effects. Taking Plusin without taking Minusin, or vice versa, can also be very serious, because they must be taken together in order to be effective. In summary, you must take exactly one of the Plusin pills and one of the Minusin pills at one time. Therefore, you open up the Plusin bottle, and you tap one Plusin pill into your hand. You put that bottle aside and you open the Minusin bottle. You do the same, but by mistake, two Minusins fall into your hand with the Plusin pill. Now, here's the problem. You weren't watching your hand as the pills fell into it, so you can't tell the Plusin pill apart from the two Minusin pills. The pills look identical. They are both the same size, same weight (10 micrograms), same color (Blue), same shape (perfect square), same everything, and they are not marked differently in any way. What are you going to do? You cannot tell which pill is which, and they cost $500 a piece, so you cannot afford to throw them away and start over again. How do you get your daily dose of exactly one Plusin and exactly one Minusin without wasting any of the pills?
Carefully cut each of the three pills in half, and carefully separate them into two piles, with half of each pill in each pile. You do not know which pill is which, but you are 100% sure that each of the two piles now contains two halves of Minusin and half of Plusin. Now go back into the Plusin bottle, take out a pill, cut it in half, and add one half to each stack. Now you have two stacks, each one containing two halves of Plusin and two halves of Minusin. Take one stack of pills today, and save the second stack for tomorrow.
72.39 %
103 votes
interviewlogicmath

A bad king has a cellar of 1000 bottles of delightful and very expensive wine. A neighboring queen plots to kill the bad king and sends a servant to poison the wine. Fortunately (or say unfortunately) the bad king's guards catch the servant after he has only poisoned one bottle. Alas, the guards don't know which bottle but know that the poison is so strong that even if diluted 100,000 times it would still kill the king. Furthermore, it takes one month to have an effect. The bad king decides he will get some of the prisoners in his vast dungeons to drink the wine. Being a clever bad king he knows he needs to murder no more than 10 prisoners – believing he can fob off such a low death rate – and will still be able to drink the rest of the wine (999 bottles) at his anniversary party in 5 weeks time. Explain what is in mind of the king, how will he be able to do so?
Think in terms of binary numbers. (now don’t read the solution, give a try). Number the bottles 1 to 1000 and write the number in binary format. bottle 1 = 0000000001 (10 digit binary) bottle 2 = 0000000010 bottle 500 = 0111110100 bottle 1000 = 1111101000 Now take 10 prisoners and number them 1 to 10, now let prisoner 1 take a sip from every bottle that has a 1 in its least significant bit. Let prisoner 10 take a sip from every bottle with a 1 in its most significant bit. etc. prisoner = 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 bottle 924 = 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 For instance, bottle no. 924 would be sipped by 10,9,8,5,4 and 3. That way if bottle no. 924 was the poisoned one, only those prisoners would die. After four weeks, line the prisoners up in their bit order and read each living prisoner as a 0 bit and each dead prisoner as a 1 bit. The number that you get is the bottle of wine that was poisoned. 1000 is less than 1024 (2^10). If there were 1024 or more bottles of wine it would take more than 10 prisoners.
72.29 %
115 votes
crazyfunnytricky

A man walks into a bar and asks the bartender for a glass of water. The bartender reaches under the bar and brings out a gun and aims it at the man. The man says thank you and leaves. What happened?
The man had the hiccups and the water helped him stop it, and the gun scared him which also help stop his hiccups as well.
72.26 %
90 votes
logicmathstory

The owner of a banana plantation has a camel. He wants to transport his 3000 bananas to the market, which is located after the desert. The distance between his banana plantation and the market is about 1000 kilometer. So he decided to take his camel to carry the bananas. The camel can carry at the maximum of 1000 bananas at a time, and it eats one banana for every kilometer it travels. What is the most bananas you can bring over to your destination?
First of all, the brute-force approach does not work. If the Camel starts by picking up the 1000 bananas and try to reach point B, then he will eat up all the 1000 bananas on the way and there will be no bananas left for him to return to point A. So we have to take an approach that the Camel drops the bananas in between and then returns to point A to pick up bananas again. Since there are 3000 bananas and the Camel can only carry 1000 bananas, he will have to make 3 trips to carry them all to any point in between. When bananas are reduced to 2000 then the Camel can shift them to another point in 2 trips and when the number of bananas left are <= 1000, then he should not return and only move forward. In the first part, P1, to shift the bananas by 1Km, the Camel will have to Move forward with 1000 bananas – Will eat up 1 banana in the way forward Leave 998 banana after 1 km and return with 1 banana – will eat up 1 banana in the way back Pick up the next 1000 bananas and move forward – Will eat up 1 banana in the way forward Leave 998 banana after 1 km and return with 1 banana – will eat up 1 banana in the way back Will carry the last 1000 bananas from point a and move forward – will eat up 1 banana Note: After point 5 the Camel does not need to return to point A again. So to shift 3000 bananas by 1km, the Camel will eat up 5 bananas. After moving to 200 km the Camel would have eaten up 1000 bananas and is now left with 2000 bananas. Now in the Part P2, the Camel needs to do the following to shift the Bananas by 1km. Move forward with 1000 bananas – Will eat up 1 banana in the way forward Leave 998 banana after 1 km and return with 1 banana – will eat up this 1 banana in the way back Pick up the next 1000 bananas and move forward – Will eat up 1 banana in the way forward Note: After point 3 the Camel does not need to return to the starting point of P2. So to shift 2000 bananas by 1km, the Camel will eat up 3 bananas. After moving to 333 km the camel would have eaten up 1000 bananas and is now left with the last 1000 bananas. The Camel will actually be able to cover 333.33 km, I have ignored the decimal part because it will not make a difference in this example. Hence the length of part P2 is 333 Km. Now, for the last part, P3, the Camel only has to move forward. He has already covered 533 (200+333) out of 1000 km in Parts P1 & P2. Now he has to cover only 467 km and he has 1000 bananas. He will eat up 467 bananas on the way forward, and at point B the Camel will be left with only 533 Bananas.
72.17 %
98 votes
logicstoryclever

You have just purchased a small company called Company X. Company X has N employees, and everyone is either an engineer or a manager. You know for sure that there are more engineers than managers at the company. Everyone at Company X knows everyone else's position, and you are able to ask any employee about the position of any other employee. For example, you could approach employee A and ask "Is employee B an engineer or a manager?" You can only direct your question to one employee at a time, and can only ask about one other employee at a time. You're allowed to ask the same employee multiple questions if you want. Your goal is to find at least one engineer to solve a huge problem that has just hit the company's factory. The problem is so urgent that you only have time to ask N-1 total questions. The major problem with questioning the employees, however, is that while the engineers will always tell you the truth about other employees' roles, the managers may lie to you if they like. You can assume that the managers will do their best to confuse you. How can you find at least one engineer by asking at most N-1 questions?
You can find at least one engineer using the following process: Put all of the employees in a conference room. If there happen to be an even number of employees, pick one at random and send him home for the day so that we start with an odd number of employees. Note that there will still be more engineers than managers after we send this employee home. Then call them out one at a time in any order. You will be forming them into a line as follows: If there is nobody currently in the line, put the employee you just called out in the line. Otherwise, if there is anybody in the line, then we do the following. Let's call the employee currently at the front of the line Employee_Front, and call the employee who we just called out of the conference room Employee_Next. So ask Employee_Front if Employee_Next is a manager or an engineer. If Employee_Front says "manager", then send both Employee_Front and Employee_Next home for the day. However, if Employee_Front says "engineer", then put Employee_Next at the front of the line. Keep doing this until you've called everyone out of the conference room. Notice that at this point, you'll have asked N-1 or less questions (you asked at most one question each time you called an employee out except for the first employee, when you didn't ask a question, so that's at most N-1 questions). When you're done calling everyone out of the conference room, the person at the front of the line is an engineer. So you've found your engineer! But the real question: how does this work? We can prove this works by showing a few things. First, let's show that if there are any engineers in the line, then they must be in front of any managers. We'll show this with a proof by contradiction. Assume that there is a manager in front of an engineer somewhere in the line. Then it must have been the case that at some point, that engineer was Employee_Front and that manager was Employee_Next. But then Employee_Front would have said "manager" (since he is an engineer and always tells the truth), and we would have sent them both home. This contradicts their being in the line at all, and thus we know that there can never be a manager in front of an engineer in the line. So now we know that after the process is done, if there are any engineers in the line, then they will be at the front of the line. That means that all we have to prove now is that there will be at least one engineer in the line at the end of the process, and we'll know that there will be an engineer at the front. So let's show that there will be at least one engineer in the line. To see why, consider what happens when we ask Employee_Front about Employee_Next, and Employee_Front says "manager". We know for sure that in this case, Employee_Front and Employee_Next are not both engineers, because if this were the case, then Employee_Front would have definitely says "engineer". Put another way, at least one of Employee_Front and Employee_Next is a manager. So by sending them both home, we know we are sending home at least one manager, and thus, we are keeping the balance in the remaining employees that there are more engineers than managers. Thus, once the process is over, there will be more engineers than managers in the line (this is also sufficient to show that there will be at least one person in the line once the process is over). And so, there must be at least one engineer in the line. Put altogether, we proved that at the end of the process, there will be at least one engineer in the line and that any engineers in the line must be in front of any managers, and so we know that the person at the front of the line will be an engineer.
72.14 %
77 votes
logicstoryclever

It was a Pink Island. There were 201 individuals (perfect logicians) lived in the island. Among them 100 people were blue eyed people, 100 were green eyed people and the leader was a black eyed one. Except the leader, nobody knew how many individuals lived in the island. Neither have they known about the color of the eyes. The leader was a very strict person. Those people can never communicate with others. They even cannot make gestures to communicate. They can only talk and communicate with the leader. It was a prison for those 200 individuals. However, the leader provided an opportunity to leave the island forever but on one condition. Every morning he questions the individuals about the color of the eyes! If any of the individuals say the right color, he would be released. Since they were unaware about the color of the eyes, all 200 individuals remained silent. When they say wrong color, they were eaten alive to death. Afraid of punishment, they remained silent. One day, the leader announced that "at least 1 of you has green eyes! If you say you are the one, come and say, I will let you go if you are correct! But only one of you can come and tell me!" How many green eyed individuals leave the island and in how many days?
All 100 green eyed individuals will leave on the 100th night. Consider, there is only one green eyed individual lived in the island. He will look at all the remaining individuals who have blue eyes. So, he can get assured that he has green eyes! Now consider 2 people with green eyes. Only reason the other green-eyed person wouldn't leave on the first night is because he sees another person with green eyes. Seeing no one else with green eyes, each of these two people realize it must be them. So both leaves on second night. This is the same for any number. Five people with green eyes would leave on the fifth night and 100 on the 100th, all at once. Search: Monty Hall problem Why it's important for the solution that the leader said the new information "at least 1 of you has green eyes", when they must knew from the beginning, that there are no less than 99 green-eyed people on the island? Because they cannot depart the island without being certain, they cannot begin the process of leaving until the guru speaks, and common knowledge is attained. Search: Common knowledge (logic)
71.95 %
68 votes
logicstory

This teaser is based on a weird but true story from a few years ago. A complaint was received by the president of a major car company: "This is the fourth time I have written you, and I don't blame you for not answering me because I must sound crazy, but it is a fact that we have a tradition in our family of having ice cream for dessert after dinner each night. Every night after we've eaten, the family votes on which flavor of ice cream we should have and I drive down to the store to get it. I recently purchased a new Pantsmobile from your company and since then my trips to the store have created a problem. You see, every time I buy vanilla ice cream my car won't start. If I get any other kind of ice cream the car starts just fine. I want you to know I'm serious about this question, no matter how silly it sounds: 'What is there about a Pantsmobile that makes it not start when I get vanilla ice cream, and easy to start whenever I get any other kind?'" The Pantsmobile company President was understandably skeptical about the letter, but he sent an engineer to check it out anyway. He had arranged to meet the man just after dinner time, so the two hopped into the car and drove to the grocery store. The man bought vanilla ice cream that night and, sure enough, after they came back to the car it wouldn't start for several minutes. The engineer returned for three more nights. The first night, the man got chocolate. The car started right away. The second night, he got strawberry and again the car started right up. The third night he bought vanilla and the car failed to start. There was a logical reason why the man's car wouldn't start when he bought vanilla ice cream. What was it? The man lived in an extremely hot city, and this took place during the summer. Also, the layout of the grocery store was such that it took the man less time to buy vanilla ice cream.
Vanilla ice cream was the most popular flavor and was on display in a little case near the express check out, while the other flavors were in the back of the store and took more time to select and check out. This mattered because the man's car was experiencing vapor lock, which is excess heat boiling the fuel in the fuel line and the resulting air bubbles blocking the flow of fuel until the car has enough time to cool.. When the car was running there was enough pressure to move the bubbles along, but not when the car was trying to start.
71.88 %
55 votes
logictricky

Fred went to a hardware store in Boston with Alex, Ben, and George. He noted that a hammer cost ten times as much as a screwdriver and a power saw cost ten times as much as a hammer. The storekeeper said that Ben could buy a power saw, George could buy a screwdriver and Alex could buy a hammer. Based on this what would the storekeeper let Fred buy? Alex's full name is Alexander and Ben's full name is Benjamin. George was Alex's boss and good friend.
Fred could buy all three (the power saw, hammer and screw driver) since he had $111 with him (a $1 bill - George Washington, a $10 Alexander Hamilton, and a $100 bill - Ben Franklin). Boston is in the USA and therefore uses the US currency I just described.
71.74 %
80 votes
funnycrazy

A man came to visit at a convent while the superior mother was out of town. He left before she returned, and was careful to leave nothing behind. The nuns said nothing about his visit, so how did the superior mother figure out that a man had been there?
Because a toilet seat was up.
71.70 %
84 votes