Kill the assassin, and the prisoners get off the hook!!
Just like how we used to check for conflicting extensions in the old Mac OS.
4 Likes
Why not this?
Only 1drop will kill. So each prisoner gets to sample 100 wines. 1 dies. Serve the 900 bottles from the live prisoners and keep the guests occupied. Give each of the remaining prisoners 11 bottles each. If someone dies, repeat. If they all live, it’s the one of the leftover one. And tell you chief spy that you expect better intelligence next time, because they should have a better idea who you enemies are.
Edit: whoops, read as 100.
Edit 2: realised my second round math was off. (Hey, it’s Friday and I’m an Arts Major).
But if you can’t serve your own wine/stall for hour 1 (we’re getting your wines settled and to appropriate temp) then keep your guests busy for hour 2-5 (at most) with 900 bottles, then you are fit neither to rule, nor host parties.
3 Likes
Uh make everyone drink a drop of their own wine first? When someone refuses… hang him? or am I missing something?
14 Likes
my guess before looking is the same problem as guessing a number between 1 and a 1000 in ten guesses.
the number of prisoners is log 2 (1000) = 10
so dividing each guess in half and narrowing down ie is it greater than 500 if so is it greater than 750 etc…
can be done in 10 guesses.
so take a bit from bottles 500 -1000 and make the first prisoner drink, if he survives
then you know it is between 1 and 499, make the next prisoner drink from 250-499 and if he survives
then you know it is between 1 - 249 keep dividing in half and doing the same
and you will get it in 10 guesses.
3 Likes
Thank you! Everyone else missed the important point. There’s room for 24 more bottled of wine. In fact, for the cost of just one more prisoner’s life, you could serve over 2,000 bottles of wine. I think we all see why the King of All Lands killed everyone else.
You’re absolutely no fun at all.
4 Likes
Googled it…
Beyond me… !! 
Pour/sip/gulp
"No, It wasn't ME Sir !"
2 Likes
give the wine to the prisoners, and serve Bourbon
-or-
serious answer…I didn’t watch the video, but here’e my solution:
- number the bottles 1-1000 in binary
- each prisoner is one bit, so with 10 prisoners we can test a max of 1024 bottles
- for each bottle, sample to the prisoners who’s bit’s are set
- in 1 hour, find the dead prisoners
- using the binary numbers as a lookup table, find the poisoned bottle.
3 Likes
That seems the easier and more poetic solution. Make every guest open their own bottle and taste it, take the bottles away, see who drops dead.
2 Likes
A couple of others have said it already, but the obvious and best solution here is to get everybody to drink one drop of their own wine. That way, either the baddie refuses to drink the wine (knowing it’s poison) and then you know exactly who the baddie is - or the baddie drinks the wine, and even better, gets hoisted by his own petard and poisoned with their own poison. This plan either reveals the villain instantly, or takes an hour at most, and best of all, doesn’t require the death of innocent people to solve the riddle. I’m sure there’s an awesome mathematical solution to the problem in the video, but like James Brown sez I don’t know karate but I know KRAZY
3 Likes
Completely naive approach:
- give each prisoner a drop from 100 bottles.
- give remaining prisoners drops from 50 bottles.
- etc.
If I run this in simulation, it solves in 5 hours tops, plus burns through 3-4 prisoners.
Now off to watch the video…
DOH!
A bitfield solution. Of course. Crap.
2 Likes
Arrange the bottles in a 10x10x10 cube. Assign each prisoner a row, column, and stack. The three dead prisoners will reveal the coordinates of the poison bottle.
(As a software engineer, though, I am appropriately ashamed that I did not think of the binary solution first.)
14 Likes
Realize that you are risking your life on your clerical and management skills just for a drink and head off to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
3 Likes
10x10x10 cube is elegant, but unless we have 30 prisoners, the there would be some ambiguity in the coordinates.
3 Likes
Have every guest take a sip from the wine he brought? Has this been ruled out already?
2 Likes
Okay. That’s what I thought, too. Is this not allowed somehow?
1 Like
Yep. Realized right after typing it that this is a base 10 analog to the binary solution, but there’s no way to know who’s X, Y, and Z. Still, we can narrow it down quite a bit. After 990 (or so) good bottles, everyone will be too blitzed to realize we replaced the last 10 with the cheap stuff from the back of the fridge, right?
4 Likes
If you are going to go through the condemned prisoners, you divide the wine into 10 lots of 100 bottles, give each prisoner a glass filled with 100 drops from one of the lots (no duplication). One prisoner will keel over in an hour. You will have 9 prisoners left, and 100 bottles that are suspect.
Each remaining prisoner will get 11 drops, except for one who gets 12. Again one will keel over in an hour, and you’ll be left with 11 or 12 suspect bottles and 8 prisoners.
Give each remaining prisoner one drop each from 8 bottles, plus one drop each of the remainder to each of 3 or 4 pairs of prisoners (that is, 6 or all 8 prisoners get 2 drops, depending, with the remaining wines each given to two people). Either one person keels over or two keel over. If one person keels over, it was from one of the wines that was uniquely distributed; if 2 keel over, it was from that specific wine from the remainder that was distributed in addition to the single drops.
Total wait: 3 hours.
Maximum casualties among the condemned prisoners: 4.
Maximum loss per bottle: 4 drops.
6 Likes
What kind of assassin wants to kill 4 (6 if you’re really stingy with the pouring) random people at a party?
Isn’t 1000 bottles for 1000 guests a bit much, anyway? Is Kingy trying to restock his cellar?
Planning Your Special Event
How much wine should you buy? Typically, one 750ml bottle of wine will yield six 4-ounce glasses. At a standup party, guests typically consume an average of two glasses of wine per hour. Therefore, if you expect fifteen guests for a party, you will need thirty glasses of wine, or five bottles. For a sit-down party, the ratio becomes one bottle for every two people; so a dinner-party for six people will require three bottles of wine. Remember that these are general guidelines only; it’s always best to keep a spare bottle or two on hand.
7 Likes
