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Drinking poison kills..

There are 8 bottles of wine, one of which is poisonous. It takes a person 8 hours to find out if a bottle of wine is poisonous. At least how many people do we need, to find out the bad wine if we only have 8 hours now?
And how?

This entry was posted on February 28, 2008 at 4:47 pm and is filed under Logical, Puzzles with tags . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Drinking poison kills..”

  1. Sreelu Says:
    February 28, 2008 at 5:05 pm

    Answer is 3..

    I worked on this earlier.. and I dont want to post spoilers so soon.. :)

    Reply
  2. srawon Says:
    February 29, 2008 at 4:54 pm

    in fact, i don’t know the answer when i posted this question ;-)
    got it later…

    Reply
  3. Bala Says:
    May 20, 2008 at 8:32 am

    Will somebody post how the answer is 3?

    Reply
  4. Naresh Kumar Says:
    June 5, 2008 at 5:01 am

    Sorry Bala for such a delayed solution.

    Let A-H be the wine bottles and M1, M2, M3 be the men we have then distribute wine in the following order

    M1 | M2 | M3
    ——————
    A | 0 | 0 | 0
    ——————
    B | 0 | 0 | 1
    ——————
    C | 0 | 1 | 0
    ——————
    D | 0 | 1 | 1
    ——————
    E | 1 | 0 | 0
    ——————
    F | 1 | 0 | 1
    ——————
    G | 1 | 1 | 0
    ——————
    H | 1 | 1 | 1

    Once you distribute the wine in the above order, based on the combination of men died we can deduce which among the 8 bottles is the poisonous one.

    For example, if none die then A is the poisonous bottle, if B dies then B is the poisonous one and if all of the die then H is the one.

    Reply
  5. Bala Says:
    June 9, 2008 at 1:11 pm

    Good one :) Thanks for the answer

    Reply

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