[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: REALLY OT: News Flash



On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 06:24:45AM -0600, Mike McCarty wrote:
> How about, you have N bags of coins. Each bag has some number
> of coins in it, each one has at least N coins. You know that
> one of the bags has counterfeit coins in it, and you know that
> the counterfeit coins each weigh one gram less than real coins.
> You have a scale. How, in one weighing, can you find which
> bag has the counterfeit coins?

Do I have to do it by weight?  Some years back, I used to be able to
have a friend throw a handful of coins (well, a small handful - I
don't think I ever did more than 6 or 7 at a time) at a hard surface and
identify what the coins were by the sound they made.  Give me a little
time to practice and I could probably identify the counterfeit coins as
not sounding right.

(OK, yeah, I know...  This is supposed to be a logic puzzle, not a
lateral-thinking puzzle.)

-- 
Windows Vista must be the first OS in history to have error codes for things
like "display quality too high"
  - Peter Gutmann, "A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection"
    http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html



Reply to: