Hint to Riddle #61: Finding the Poisoned Bottle of Wine
61. A bad king has a cellar of 1000 bottles of delightful and very expensive wine. A neighbouring queen plots to kill the bad king and sends a servant to poison the wine. Fortunately (or say unfortunately) the bad king's guards catch the servant after he has only poisoned one bottle. Alas, the guards don't know which bottle but know that the poison is so strong that even if diluted 100,000 times it would still kill the king. Furthermore, it takes around a month to have an effect. The bad king decides he will buy some slaves to drink the wine. Being a clever bad king he knows he need only buy 10 slaves and will still be able to drink the rest of the wine (999 bottles) at his anniversary party in 5 weeks time. Explain what is in the mind of the king, how will he be able to do so ?
This puzzle is easy enough to answer if you have a decent understanding of the way numbers are written in binary. If you don't you might have to design the concept from first principals. Which will be tough.I've included below a couple of tools from the answer page that might help you get the idea of how binary numbers work and how they might be useful to answer the puzzle.
| 128 | 64 | 32 | 16 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 1 |
| 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
01011101 = 93 = 64 + 16 + 8 + 4 + 1
Note: no information is sent to me, the calculation is done entirely locally, on your computer.
Binary is in base 10
| 512 | 256 | 128 | 64 | 32 | 16 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 1 |
| ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
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