Archive for the ‘Riddles’ Category

Hats in a Line

Sunday, November 16th, 2008

hats_small2.jpgThis riddle is a very cool extension of a well known (and easy) riddle, involving people with hats waiting in a line.

So, lets begin with the original:

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Valid Planar Pairing

Saturday, November 24th, 2007

pairing_icon.gifThere are 100 red dots and 100 blue dots on the plane (a lot of planar riddles lately). The dots are arranged such that no three are on the same line.

pairing of the red dots and the blue dots is a one-to-one function that assigns one blue dot to each red dot.

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Uncountable Union

Wednesday, November 21st, 2007

easyriddle.gifA very interesting riddle for those of you with some basic background in Set Theory.

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Expanding Frogs

Wednesday, November 21st, 2007

frog.jpgA very easy riddle. Four frogs are sitting on the corners of the unit square (i.e. they have coordinates (0,0), (0,1), (1,1) and (1,0) ). Each turn, a frog can jump over any other frog, thereby transferring itself to the symmetrical point on the other side of the static frog. For example, if the frog at (0,0) jumps over the frog at (1,1) it will land on (2,2).

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Peons

Monday, November 5th, 2007

peons_explain.jpg This is a cute puzzle. Consider an infinite checkerboard divided in two with an infinite line lying along the x-axis, as depicted below:

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Find the Duplicate

Saturday, October 13th, 2007

Dany Valevsky gave me this very cool riddle.

You are given a vector of size N, the elements of which are numbers in the range 1,…,N-1. I.e. there is at least one repeating element. Give an algorithm that finds a repeating element (it does not matter which one, in case there are several) with O(N) time complexity and O(log(N)) memory complexity.

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Pirates!

Saturday, October 13th, 2007

easyriddle.gifA ship in the plane has integer coordinates. It also has integer velocity (again in ZxZ). Each turn the ship advances according to its velocity. Here is an example of a ship with velocity (3, 1).

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Piece of Cake

Thursday, August 23rd, 2007

In this article you will find a collection of riddles. They are all either very well known or extremely easy. Enjoy!

Cutting the Cake

cake1.jpgHow can you cut a circular cake to eight even pieces with 3 cuts? What is the maximum number of pieces possible with 4 cuts?

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23 and 2000

Monday, August 13th, 2007

easyriddle.gifYou are given 23 whole numbers, not necessarily distinct, in a row.

You cannot change the order of the numbers.

Prove that there exists an arrangement of the symbols ’+’, ‘×’, ‘(’ and ‘)’ in-between the 23 numbers, such that the final result is a valid formula, whose evaluated value equals 0 mod 2000.

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You are in my Seat!

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

plane_seats.jpg There are 100 seats in an airplane.

There are 99 male passangers with reserved seats and one female passager that does not have a ticket.

The female passanger enters the plane first, selects a random seat (out of the total 100 seats) and sits in it.

Then the first man enters. If his seat is not taken he sits in it. If it is taken he selects a non-occupied random seat in the plane and sits there.

The rest of the men enters and does the same - each of them first tries to take his own seat (if it is available) and otherwise sits in a random non-occupied seat.

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