I wasn't familiar with 'Poison and Rat' puzzle that the post mentions as an inspiration of the title riddle. Without looking at the answer I came up with a geometric interpretation of it (explained below as this is a spoiler to the Poison and Rat puzzle).
Obviously 1000 rats is a wrong solution, you could remove one and still get the answer. But we could get better than that when you think about a thousand as three dimensional cube (10^3). Treating a rat with just one layer of the cube we could optimize to 30 rats. At this point I looked the answer they suggested and it was 10 (binary representation). Obviously one can construct a mulitdimensional cube with just two a…
Sixteen bottles of wine riddle
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Re: Sixteen bottles of wine riddle
#22Another bottle-of-wine riddle I have been interested in recently: Say you have B number of tastings and can use each to taste any mix of wines, and you know that exactly zero, one or two of the wines are bad/poisoned/whatever. How many bottles of wine (N) can you cover in those B tastings?
Optimal solutions are known for B (This is OEIS A286874 / A303977; https://oeis.org/A286874 https://oeis.org/A303977)
Re: Sixteen bottles of wine riddle
#23Too easy. You just mix all 16 together, chuck them into the machine, take cover, then walk out through the now exploded door/hole. Bonus points if you convince her to leave, and rig it up right above the door for when she comes back, home alone style.
Better yet, mix fifteen of the bottles together to do this, then pocket the other one. It's free wine!
Re: Sixteen bottles of wine riddle
#24I love riddles like this. Has anyone found any good collections of these? Whenever I try to search for riddles online, I end up with mostly results containing wordplay riddles like "what has a mouth but doesn't eat, ..."
Teh Guardian used to (?) publish puzzles by Chris Maslanka which were like this, and, as i recall, pretty good. There are a couple of books collecting them:
https://www.worldofbooks.com/en-gb/products/the-pyrgic-puzzl...
https://www.worldofbooks.com/en-gb/products/pyrgic-puzzles-b...
This should be more of the same:
https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/university-of-the-mind-fiend...
The GCHQ Christmas Challenges might be worth a look too.
Re: Sixteen bottles of wine riddle
#25I love riddles like this. Has anyone found any good collections of these? Whenever I try to search for riddles online, I end up with mostly results containing wordplay riddles like "what has a mouth but doesn't eat, ..."
I maintain my personal collection of pure logic riddles here: https://www.oliverhill.xyz/riddles
Re: Sixteen bottles of wine riddle
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could just label the years 2000 - 2015. It just says "sixteen possible years", not where these years are on the timeline.
I originally set it up like that, but felt having to explain that you need to subtract 2000 before doing the binary conversion was unnecessary and kind of distracting
You could have them be Cambodian wines, dated according to the Kampuchean revolutionary calendar. That way, you even get a year zero.
Re: Sixteen bottles of wine riddle
#27You need at least 45 guesses since 2^44 < 16!
Re: Sixteen bottles of wine riddle
#28Too easy. You just mix all 16 together, chuck them into the machine, take cover, then walk out through the now exploded door/hole. Bonus points if you convince her to leave, and rig it up right above the door for when she comes back, home alone style.
Noted down for the next RPG campaign.
Re: Sixteen bottles of wine riddle
#29Re: Sixteen bottles of wine riddle
#30nice! an alternative solution I came up with (it's the same intuition as divide and conquer, just a flattened out version, same value of 49):
Just go left to right on each bottle, and keep track of how often each prefix has appeared (i.e. on the first bottle, if you get 1, 0, 0, 1), we'd keep track of: {"1": 1, "10": 1, "100": 1}. Now, if a prefix of length 1 appears 7 times, or a prefix of length 2 appears 3 times, we stop measuring (because there's only 1 left).
In all cases, for 8 bottles you will need 4 measurements, for 4 bottles you will need 3 measurements, 2 bottles will require 2 measurements, and 2 bottles will require 1 measurement. (4 * 8) + (4 * 3) + (2 * 2) + (2 * 1) = 32 + 12 + 4 + 2 = 50. But for the very last bottle, you can just do 0 measurements, by way of process of elimination. so 50 - 1 = 49.