How many slave?

Level pending

The king arranged a party and ordered 1000 drink bottles. He found that One drink bottle consists of poison which causes death within 10 min even a drop of drink taken. There are 1000 slaves to check which bottle consists of poison.

Least how many slaves required to point out the poisonous bottle? (Party starts in 30 minutes)

The answer is 10.

2 solutions

Telugu Bishop
Feb 1, 2014

We can use binary system .........1000<1024=2^10.........

We can test the samples

slave 1= bottle 1:

slave 2= bottle 2:

slave 3= bottle 1 + bottle 2:

.......0000000001 (slave 1 only died) means first bottle is poisonous

.......0000000010 (slave 2 only died) means second is poisonous

.......0000000011 (slave 1 and slave 2 died) means third is poisonous... so on....

So Answer=10

I don't mean tot be pedantic, and I realise the question is supposed to be taken as 'how many slaves does it take to point out the poison bottle with all of them tasting only one time?' But nowhere in the question the way this site asked it does it prevent the solution from being 'take one slave and have him taste each bottle, waiting ten minutes in between each'

Toon Cuyvers - 7 years, 2 months ago

Thanks for comments. Edited the question.

Telugu Bishop - 6 years, 5 months ago

Mudra Desai
Apr 1, 2014

Write a solution. We can use binary system .........1000<1024=2^10.........