Teaser Tuesday! March 4, 2014

Hopefully you guys find this one a bit more challenging!

Note: If you could all please input your answers using the previously noted html code it will allow others to answer without having a spoiler. Also, in your answer, do not include any ' or " or it will not work properly.

Question

An evil king has 1000 bottles of wine. A neighboring queen plots to kill the bad king, and sends a servant to poison the wine. The king's guards catch the servant after he has only poisoned one bottle. The guards don't know which bottle was poisoned, but they do know that the poison is so potent that even if it was diluted 1,000,000 times, it would still be fatal. Furthermore, the effects of the poison take one month to surface. The king decides he will get some of his prisoners in his vast dungeons to drink the wine. Rather than using 1000 prisoners each assigned to a particular bottle, this king knows that he needs to murder no more than 10 prisoners to figure out what bottle is poisoned, and will still be able to drink the rest of the wine in 5 weeks time. How does he pull this off?

Good Luck!

 

SPOILER ALERT: (sorry guys trying to figure out how to make that Answer button... the code wont work for me, some mod please correct this; peyo22 sorry for quoting you, I tried to copy your code because the one given above was not working for me)

With the limited info given, I come to the conclusion that I could do this with only one prisoner. Firstly, I would mark all the bottles with numbers (1-1000). Secondly, every bottle would be assigned a strict trying time (this could be, for example, one minute between each bottle). Thirdly, this poor prisoner would have to follow the schedule, and try each bottle at the pre-assigned time. Finally, we would wait exactly one month from trying the first bottle to see at what time the prisoner will die. If the premise that the effects of the poison take one month to surface is correct, it would not be problem to see exactly which bottle killed the prisoner.

For more convenience, you could increase the time between trying each bottle, and you could add more people. With ten people, each guy would try only 100 bottles.

 

Can prisoners die from alcohol poisoning?

"For I am a sinner in the hands of an angry God. Bloody Mary full of vodka, blessed are you among cocktails. Pray for me now and at the hour of my death, which I hope is soon. Amen."
 

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