Anyone who’s a fan of the Columbo television series staring Peter Falk, will already be familiar with a variation of this little chestnut.
The red, blue and green bags all contain visually identical complements of twenty gold pieces, but two of the bags contain real gold coins weighing ten grams each, whilst the other contains forgeries weighing an additional one gram per piece. You can do whatever you like with the content of each bag, but the battery powering the scale is good for one measurement only.
Which bag contains the fake gold?
Solution
Remove one coin from the red bag, two from the blue, three from the green, and place all six coins upon the scale. As we know the scale would read sixty grams if all coins were genuine, we’re left with three possible readings each correlating to the red, blue and green bag, respectively: sixty-one grams, sixty-two grams, or sixty-three grams.
As these blogs are written in a relatively short time frame, please feel free to point out any omissions, typos, spelling and/or grammatical errors. Whilst I’m not particularly interested in participles, conjunctives, infinitives, or the like, I will nonetheless be happy to correct them.
Within the next hundred years or so, over seven billion people will die; be happy and don’t sweat the small stuff.
The original GEEKSHEEK
GEEKSHEEK 