Top Ten Puzzles

Each ant starts randomly picks a direction and starts to move along the edge of the triangle. What is the probability that none of the ants collide? vipin Scholar Asked on 26th July 2015 in Math Puzzles.

Four people need to cross a rickety bridge at night. Unfortunately, they have only one torch and the bridge is too dangerous to cross without one. The bridge is only strong enough to support two people at a time. Not all people take the same time to cross the bridge. Times for each person: 1 min, 2 mins, 7 mins and 10 mins.

The burning rope problem is a logic puzzle that doesn't require much math, or even pen and paper. Just the ol' noggin. It's a fun — if not infuriating — one to try out with friends and family.

1/3 of the time, the door to heaven will be chosen, so 1/3 of the time it will take zero days. 1/3 of the time, the 1-day door is chosen; of those, the right door will be chosen the next day, so 1/9 trips take 1 day.

Problem: You are blindfolded and 10 coins are place in front of you on table. You are allowed to touch the coins, but can’t tell which way up they are by feel. You are told that there are 5 coins head up, and 5 coins tails up but not which ones are which.

For instance, bottle no. 924 would be sipped by 10,9,8,5,4 and 3. That way if bottle no. 924 was the poisoned one, only those prisoners would die. After four weeks, line the prisoners up in their bit order and read each living prisoner as a 0 bit and each dead prisoner as a 1 bit. The number that you get is the bottle of wine that was poisoned.

Puzzle: This problem is also called Jelly Beans problem. This is the most commonly asked interview puzzle. You have 3 jars that are all mislabeled. One jar contains Apple, another contains Oranges and the third jar contains a mixture of both Apple and Oranges.

Puzzle: You have two jars, 50 red marbles and 50 blue marbles. You need to place all the marbles into the jars such that when you blindly pick one marble out of one jar, you maximize the chances that it will be red. When picking, you’ll first randomly pick a jar, and then randomly pick a marble out of that jar.