Manning Missions
A spy agency currently has three missions to accomplish.
They consider a mission to be properly manned if there are at least three people on that mission. But the catch is that the agency does not assign missions to their agents, but the agents each choose the mission they like.
What is the minimum number of agents the agency needs to have available so that they can guarantee that at least one mission will be properly manned?
The answer is 7.
This section requires Javascript.
You are seeing this because something didn't load right. We suggest you, (a) try
refreshing the page, (b) enabling javascript if it is disabled on your browser and,
finally, (c)
loading the
non-javascript version of this page
. We're sorry about the hassle.
1 solution
To be certain of success you need 3 people in 1 mission. So the closest real number (because you can't have half a spy) that is smaller then 3 is 2. Since there are 3 missions, (3x2) the 6 spies can each, albeit unlikely, separate in groups of 2, but if there is one more spy, so 7, the last one's got to join one of the 3 groups to make a group of 3. I'm pretty confident everybody had this one.