Without looking at the previous answers, this is clearly a problem for binary coding (hence the 10 prisoners.)
Number every bottle from 1-1000 with its number in binary, and keep track of who brought which bottle.
Make prisoner 1 drink a little sip from all the bottles where the lowest binary digit is 1, i.e. odd-numbered bottles, prisoner 2 drink a little sip from all the bottles where the second-lowest binary digit is 1, prisoner 3 drink a little sip from all the bottles where the third-lowest binary digit is 1, and so on. They each get about 500 little sips, so at least they can die mildly sloshed.
Wait an hour to see who drops dead.
If some of them do, total up the powers of 2 corresponding to the ones who died - 1 for prisoner 1, 2 for prisoner 2, 4 for prisoner 3, 8 for prisoner 4, etc. - and that gives you the number of the poisoned bottle. Look up which guest brought it and make them drink the rest of it.
If none of the prisoners drop dead, you’ve been misinformed. String up the spy who told you this ridiculous story - isn’t he named Head Vizier Bannon or something like that?
It is an exercise to disect oneself. I feel much the same way, and it is a trap I fall into time and and again. Breaking yourself down in public, when you know that is what’s needed is a unified you.
I don’t see either side as a bad thing or a failing. However tempering that kind of mental process with a pragmatic or even procedural process can be enormously beneficial .
Carp, I’m doing it right now.
Pro tip, never psycho analyze yourself. It’s… Turtles all the way down.
On the other hand, having everyone taste their own wine could be spun as a game, then the big reveal as one of their peers either bolts for the exit or drops dead. Then you can turn it into a show of strength, like the scene with Capone in The Untouchables.
If you are troubled by the party, poison and condemned prisoners, consider it one corrupt fuel delivery to an orbiting remote spacecraft, that has to be launched in 90 minutes, due to the rendezvous time. You’ve been informed that one of the cells has contaminated fuel in it and will cause an explosion when used, but you can take samples and get results back within an hour. But you can only run 10 tests.
How do you get the result in only 10 tests and avoid sending up the bad fuel cell by mistake?
I suppose we could posit some Rules of Hostelry here , assuming this King isn’t into Red Wedding-style dinners.
You’d never force your guests to drink a specific wine. Let them choose.
You would never EVER reveal to the public that there was an assassin. Prisoners are gaijjin so nobody cares about them. After you ID the badguy, just disappear him, and if any other guest asks, you say he was unfortunately delayed.
That’s why you can’t make the guests test their own wine.
True enough. But of course, absolute monarchy was always an ideal that hid the reality of constant negotiation between the monarch and the nobility. But force and the ability to lock people up or kill them outright was part of the package.
Unless it’s bottle 0 that gets poisoned, in which case nobody dies. Or, the distribution could be where the nth prisoner gets all bottles where the nth bit is zero, and everyone dies if the zeroth bottle is poisoned.
In classic cases (Louis XIV?), the constant manipulation of the nobility, maybe. “I’m taking an awful risk if I plot against His Majesty,” and “I maintain my position because of the status quo” is the way I put it, but old Louis had his nobility convinced that there was status to be had in carrying his chamber pot.
Yup. If that one is poisoned, you know by a process of elimination. My proposed solution by decimation was unworkable because the latency of the poison was 2 days, not 1 hour (gotta get the Powers here to edit their text), but the number of deaths is predictable. In the fastest solution, it runs from none to all.
