I'm bored. Let's brain tease.
Offline I'm having a fit of insomnia mixed with boredom. So let's brain tease, bitches. I'll provide the answers (concealed). See how you do, and feel free to post your own. Promote critical thinking!
*edit*
Oops! My clever trick of trying to post the answers as black text on black highlight shows up in the edit box, but fails miserably when published. Why doesn't it work? It's such a useful trick. Ah well. Answers are no longer cleverly concealed, but are now moved to the end of this post. Tsk tsk.
*/edit*
Problem 1:
Suppose you are running a foot race with 9 other runners. If you overtake the runner in second place, what place are you in?
Problem 2:
Suppose you are running in the same foot race, and suppose you overtake the runner in last place. What position are you in?
Problem 3:
Suppose you are running in the same foot race, and suppose you overtake the runner in 5th place, then the runner in 4th place, and then the runner in 3rd place. What position are you in now?
Problem 4:
You have $1,000. Now give yourself $40. Now add another $1,000. Now add $30. Give yourself yet another $1,000. Now add $20. Give yourself one more $1,000. Now give yourself $10. In total, how much money do you now have?
LINGUISTIC BRAIN TEASER/EXPERIMENT THING:
This is an experiment I was trying earlier today, and I'm pretty sure I came up with at least one solution, but you're free to criticize. Here's what I need from you. I need you to give me a sentence. More specifically, I need you to give me a sentence fragment, but I'm looking for a very specific kind. Here are the rules:
1. Start writing any sentence and then break it off at some point.
2. Try to break off the sentence at a place where the sentence MUST be continued in order to form a complete grammatical sentence. (i.e. If you begin writing the sentence, "You must have seen my pants", breaking the sentence off after "seen" doesn't meet this requirement, since the sentence could stand as it is, whereas breaking it off after "my" does meet the requirement, since it requires more.)
3. While meeting the above requirement, try to also break off the sentence at a point where there is only ONE WORD that could possibly come next in the sentence. (e.g. The previous fragment, "You must have seen my," no longer works since there are thousands of words that could come after "my".)
4. Splitting a famous quote doesn't count.
Can you find such a fragment?
Hope someone had fun! Feel free to post your own!
SOLUTIONS:
PROBLEM 1:
If you said first, you're being too hasty. You'd be in second.
PROBLEM 2:
Actually, you can't answer this question. It doesn't make any sense.
PROBLEM 3:
I hope the first two questions didn't make you self conscious. You'd just be in third place. Boring, huh?
PROBLEM 4:
The correct answer is $4,100. This is not a trick question. If you came out with $5,000, then you are tricking yourself. Ask yourself how that happened.
A POSSIBLE SOLUTION (MAYBE) TO LINGUISTIC THING:
I can't remember which drawer this knife came out...
A place common to all will be maintained by none. A religion common to all is perhaps not much different.
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I have $2050. $4100 is the total you get if you add all of the money to your pot, but money you give yourself should not actually add anything to the pot, and you 'give' yourself a total of $2050 while you are given $1000 at the start of the problem and the problem states to 'add' another $1050 through the course of the problem.
If you say you have $4100 then you are essentially saying you are magical because you can give yourself money and have it duplicate. Which would then lead to the question;
Why are you wasting your time with brain teasers when you could have more fun collapsing the world's economy?
Actually, if you overtake the person in last place you will be in last place, as he could not have been in last place if you were behind him, unless you weren't an actual participant in the rase, so you must have been in front of him, running backwards.
I have no idea how anyone could reach $5000.
When you say it like that you make it sound so Sinister...
P4 asks for the total pot, not what you added to it. So $4,100 is the correct answer. Although I did get $5,000 on the first run through. How that happened, I have no idea but now that I know what the right answer is, I can't recover the original wrong answer. Possibly the question tempts a carry error.
P2 does not make sense. If you overtake anyone, you must start from behind them. In order to overtake the person in last place, you must have been in last place to begin with. So the first person you can overtake is the person in last-1 place.
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Gene is exactly right about P2. I also got $2050 on P4. If you give yourself money you still have the same amount. I guess it's a matter of interpretation. Maybe you're giving yourself money from somebody's wallet...
Can't think of one to meet the linguistic problem's specs.
After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.
MySpace
"I opened my wallet and pulled a dollar..."
OK, here are some new brain teasers:
Following are some series of numbers. You have to provide the next number in the sequence.
Scoring will be as follows:
1 point for the first person to provide each correct answer.
3 bonus point if all three correct answers come in a single post (before correct answers are posted for any of them).
10 bonus points if the person to win the 3 bonus points can also post the relationship between the three sequences.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233
729, 1000, 1331, 1728, 2197, 2744
648, 900, 1210, 1584, 2028, 2548
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377 Numbers are equal to sum of the two previous numbers.
3375 Numbers are cubes. Starting at 9 ending at 15.
3150 Numbers are the previous number added to a sub list which is derived from another sub list starting at 58 and increasing by 6.
After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.
MySpace
So what can I do with my bonus points?
I thought that the answer was first place and you overlapped the last place runner.
"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."
British General Charles Napier while in India
Second.
You mean I lapped him? Then I must be in first place.
You mean the very same race? Well, I'm already in 1st, from Problem 2, therefore I must be lapping the runners in 5th, 4th, and 3rd. I'm still in 1st place! Man, I'm kicking ass.
Okay, I have $1000.
Okay, from the $1000 I have, I give myself $40. Hmm. I still have a total of $1000.
Okay, now I have $2000.
$2030
Still $2030.
$2050
Still $2050.
Who am ...
People lap the person in last place in footraces all the time.
The question posed that you are running in "the same" race, which means you have to take the previous conditions of the race into account. You lapped more people, and are therefore in 1st place.
You can't 'give yourself' money. You can take money from somewhere else, or you can give money to someone else, but giving money to yourself results in a net 0 gain/loss.
If we eliminate the 'give yourself' tansactions, the answer is $2050. If we further eliminate the 'add' transactions (since it does not explicitly state what you are adding to), then the answer is $1000.
from? of? with? on? in?
All of them are grammatically correct. You have to find a construction where there is only one grammatical possibility. For example, "two plus two equals ..." would still be grammatically correct if the sentence was "two plus two equals five". It's not asking about logical validity, but grammatical structure.
Wonderist on Facebook — Support the idea of wonderism by 'liking' the Wonderism page — or join the open Wonderism group to take part in the discussion!
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"... out."
but also
"... from the till and put it in my wallet."
Wonderist on Facebook — Support the idea of wonderism by 'liking' the Wonderism page — or join the open Wonderism group to take part in the discussion!
Gnu Atheism Facebook group — All gnu-friendly RRS members welcome (including Luminon!) — Try something gnu!
Posting brain teasers on a forum like this, I should have expected loopholes to be found an exploited.
A place common to all will be maintained by none. A religion common to all is perhaps not much different.
6 points. You have all the answers right but you missed the reason why they are right.
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The first series is the fibonacci series, starting at fib(9), if we count fib(1) as 0.
The second series is x^3, starting at 9. The third series is x^3 - x^2, starting at 9. That's the only link I could find, that they are all starting at 9. If there's some link between fib(x), x^3, and x^3 - x^2, then I couldn't see it. Fib(x) increases exponentially, as opposed to polynomially, so it seems hard to find a relationship.
Wonderist on Facebook — Support the idea of wonderism by 'liking' the Wonderism page — or join the open Wonderism group to take part in the discussion!
Gnu Atheism Facebook group — All gnu-friendly RRS members welcome (including Luminon!) — Try something gnu!
OK, Natural gets the ten points. All the series started with the ninth member. Also, he found the correct formula for the third series. How Spike got the correct answer with the wrong formula, I have no idea.
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It's not the wrong formula, I just didn't bother to remove reduntant terms.
[edit] I didn't notice that they started at the ninth element though.
After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.
MySpace