[Puzzle] Poisoned wine: Fun with bases
Puzzle: Poisoned Wine You have 240 barrels of wine, one of which has been poisoned. After drinking the poisoned wine, one dies within 24 hours. You have 5 slaves whom you are willing to sacrifice in order to determine which barrel contains the poisoned wine. How do you achieve this in 48 hours? (Please try the puzzle before you skip to the solution mentioned at the bottom of this page.) Solution: We are gonna play with number bases this time. Hope you are familiar with them, or else you will not understand a bit after this sentence (Apologies. Thanks.). So, we have 5 slaves. Lets just forget about number of barrels and also assume that we have only 1 day. One day and five slaves, thats it. Can we determine how many barrels can we solve with our new constraints? Yes, we can. Lets see how: Five slaves and one chance. They must drink in a fashion that covers all the barrels and drink in a unique way i.e each barrel must be drank by a unique set of slaves, so that when some slaves die, ...