100 people are standing in a circle. The person standing at number 1 is having a sword. He kills the person next to him with the sword and then gives the sword to the third person. This process is carried out till there is just one person left. Which number survives at the last?
73rd person will survive at last.
If the number of players is the power of 2, the last person to survive will be the one who started it.
But since the number here is not the power of 2, we will take the greatest power of 2 that is less than the number of players (100) which is 64.
So when starting with 100 players - we need to kill 36 of them to get down to a power of 2 (64). Since we kill every other person starting at player 2 the last person we need to die is player 72, they will be killed by player 71 and the first person in the effective power of 2 game, who will win is player 73.
It's worth noting that this process of reducing to a power of 2 will always be completed in the first round regardless of the number of players.
Consider X players, let Y be the highest power of 2 that is less than or equal to Y
The winning player is 2 * (X - Y) + 1
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.
A train leaves from Halifax, Nova Scotia heading towards Vancouver, British Columbia at 120 km/h. Three hours later, a train leaves Vancouver heading towards Halifax at 180 km/h. Assume there's exactly 6000 kilometers between Vancouver and Halifax. When they meet, which train is closer to Halifax?
Both trains would be at the same spot when they meet therefore they are both equally close to Halifax.
You're walking down a path and come to two doors. One of the doors leads to a life of prosperity and happiness, and the other door leads to a life of misery and sorrow. You don't know which door is which.
In front of the door is ONE man. You know that this man either always lies, or always tells the truth, but you don't know which. The man knows which door is which.
You are allowed to ask the man ONE yes-or-no question to figure out which door to go through. To make things more difficult, the man is very self-centered, so you are only allowed to ask him a question about what he thinks or knows; your question cannot involve what any other person or object (real or hypothetical) might say.
What question should you ask to ensure you go through the good door?
You should ask: "If I asked you if the good door is on the left, would you say yes?"
Notice that this is subtly different than asking "Is the good door on the left?", in that you are asking him IF he would say yes to that question, not what his answer to the question would be. Thus you are asking a question about a question, and if it ends up being the liar you are talking to, this will cause him to lie about a lie and thus tell the truth. The four possible cases are:
The man is a truth-teller and the good door is on the left. He will say "yes".
The man is a truth-teller and the good door is on the right. He will say "no".
The man is a liar and the good door is on the left. He will say "yes" because if you asked him "Is the good door on the left?", he would lie and say "no", and so when you ask him if he would say "yes", he will lie and say "yes".
The man is a liar and the good door is on the right. Similar to the previous example, he'll say "no".
So regardless of whether the man is a truth-teller or a liar, this question will get a "yes" if the door on the left is the good door, and a "no" if it's not.
