You have a cellar of 1000 bottles of wine which you need to use for your king’s party in 1 day’s time. However, a spy from a neighboring hostile nation had one of the bottles poisoned. Now, the interesting thing about this poison is that it takes exactly 1 day to take effect… Your task is to find out which bottle contains the poison within a day so as not to affect the party. With 10 death row prisoners at your disposal, how can you complete your task?
I haven come out with the exact soln but I believe the idea is to use combinatorial to find how many people out of 10 need to sample each bottle of wine such that we have at least 1000 possible way. Let this critical number be x. Then 10Cx produce at least 1000 unique configuration of group of x number of death row prisoners. The poison bottle is the one coresponding to the group of x death row prisoners that died.
ReplyDeleteYou've got the idea. Now work on the configuration, shouldn't be that hard for ya. =)
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