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Friday, February 15, 2008

Identify the poisoned wine

CAN YOU SOLVE THIS PUZZLE?

A king has 1000 bottles of wine. An assasin tried to poison the wine. The king's guards caught the assasin after he poisoned only one bottle, but they did not know which bottle was poisoned.

It is known however that the poison is so powerful that even a tiny bit of the poisoned wine will kill, and it is known also that the poison will only kill after 24 hours. The king order you, his advisor, to get some of the criminals in the dungeon to test the wines for him. The king expects to find out the result the next day, essentially 24 hours after the testers drink the wine.

Now the simplest way is if 1000 criminals were available, just get them to each drink a little bit from each of the 1000 bottles. Hence, the poisoned bottle will be identified when one particular tester, out of the thousand testers, dies the following day. However, only 10 criminals is imprisoned in the dungeon on that particular day!

Is there a way to identify the poisoned bottle by the following day using only 10 testers? What is the method?"

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