Thursday, July 19, 2007

Puzzle 2: Bad King

A bad king has a cellar of 1000 bottles of delightful and very expensive wine. A neighbouring queen plots to kill the bad king and sends a servant to poison the wine. (Un)fortunately 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 1,000,000 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 at his anniversary party in 5 weeks time.

Explain how....

3 comments:

jeerjeerak said...

get 1000 prisonors, give a drop of each bottle to each and wait 4 weeks to see which one dies.

either i'm not getting puzzle 1 and 2 correctly, or they are silly!

styx said...

I think jeerjeerak is correct here. Get 1000 prisoners and give them a drop to each. Only one will die! and one is less than 10!

jeerjeerak said...

For styx:

apparently the question is missing a point. you shouldn't involve more than 10 prisoners.