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11 / 16
Sand Timers
You have two sand timers, which can show 4 minutes and 7 minutes respectively. Use both the sand timers(at a time or one after other or any other combination) and measure a time of 9 minutes.
12 / 16
You and your friend are caught by gangsters and made to play a game to determine if you should live or die. The game is simple.
There is a deck of cards and you both have to choose a card. You can look at each other's cards but not at the card you have chosen. You both will survive if both are correct in guessing the card they have chosen. Otherwise, both die.
What is the probability of you surviving if you and your friend play the game optimally?
13 / 16
Blind Man and Cards
A blind-folded man is handed a deck of 52 cards and told that exactly 10 of these cards are facing up. How can he divide the cards into two sets with each set having the same number of cards facing up?
14 / 16
The Greek philosophers
One day three Greek philosophers settled under the shade of an olive tree, opened a bottle of Retsina, and began a lengthy discussion of the Fundamental Ontological Question: Why does anything exist?
After a while, they began to ramble. Then, one by one, they fell asleep. While the men slept, three owls, one above each philosopher, completed their digestive process, dropped a present on each philosopher's forehead, the flew off with a noisy "hoot." Perhaps the hoot awakened the philosophers. As soon as they looked at each other, all three began, simultaneously, to laugh.
Then, one of them abruptly stopped laughing. Why?
15 / 16
Bruce is an inmate in a large prison, and like most of the other prisoners, he smokes cigarettes. During his time in the prison, Bruce finds that if he has 3 cigarette butts, he can cram them together and turn them into 1 full cigarette. Whenever he smokes a cigarette, it turns into a cigarette butt.
One day, Bruce is in his cell talking to one of his cellmates, Steve.
"I really want to smoke 5 cigarettes today, but all I have are these 10 cigarette butts," Bruce tells Steve. "I'm not sure that will be enough."
"Why don't you borrow some of Tom's cigarette butts?" asks Steve, pointing over to a small pile of cigarette butts on the bed of their third cellmate, Tom, who is out for the day on a community service project.
"I can't," Bruce says. "Tom always counts exactly how many cigarette butts are in his pile, and he'd probably kill me if he notices that I had taken any."
However, after thinking for a while, Bruce figures out a way that he can smoke 5 cigarettes without angering Tom. What is his plan?
16 / 16
There are N secret agents each knows a different piece of secret information. They can telephone each other and exchange all the information they know. After the telephone call, they both know anything that either of them knew before the call. What is the minimum number of telephone calls needed so that all of them know everything?
Sapient Practice Set
