What strategy would ensure that you drink 3 bottles of milk within 24 hours?
Solution
This is a tricky interview question to get hired at Google.
Let’s solve the problem.
Hour 0 : feed the rat bottle one.
Hour 1 : feed the rat bottle two.
Hour 2 : feed the rat bottle three.
You will get the answer when you time 10 hours after each feeding which will inform you about the poisonous bottle.
If the rat lives past hour 12, you will know it is bottle four .
Mathematically, you should get an answer in 12 hours.
You can also get solutions by using less than 1 hour in the previous steps.
Do you think that we have solved the problem ? No that’s not true, at the end you wouldn’t have 3 complete bottles, as the rat would have drunk a little bit from each tested bottle. So you’d have less than 3 bottles.
That was the trick! It is not easy to get hired at Google.
Every problem you tackle makes you smarter.
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Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.
-Archimedes-