I have 11 stacks of marbles, each stack consisting of 10 marbles. I am also given a digital scale with arbitrary precision. All of these marbles are indistinguishable.
Given that all the stacks of marbles are made of glass weighing 10 grams each except one stack which are all made from clay but still looks like glass. A clay marble weighs 9 grams.
What is the minimum amount of weighing needed such that you can identify the stack containing the clay ones?
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With all the stacks lined up in a row, take 1 marble from the first stack, two from the second, and in general n marbles from the n th stack for 1 ≤ n ≤ 1 0 , and then no marbles from the 1 1 th stack.
If all the stacks were composed of glass marbles then we would expect this set of 5 5 marbles to have a mass of 5 5 0 grams. If this is the measurement then we can conclude that the 1 1 th stack is composed of clay marbles. But if the n th stack (for some n such that 1 ≤ n ≤ 1 0 ) is composed of clay marbles, then the digital scale will read ( 5 5 0 − n ) grams. Thus only 1 measurement is required.