Imagine that you have three boxes, one containing two black balls, one containing two white balls, and the third containing one black ball and one white ball.

The boxes were originally labelled for their contents (BB - WW - BW) but someone has inadvertently switched the labels so that now every box is incorrectly labelled.

Without looking inside, you are allowed to take one ball at a time out of any box that you wish, and by this process of sampling, you are to determine the contents of all three boxes.

What is the smallest number of drawings needed to do this?

(In reply to up a tree by Seth Sauer)

yes I agree with you Seth......three weighings do help us to label the boxes correctly but........i am sorry to say that it is not the desired answer.........just think more if you can reduce the number of drawings.........all the best........

Posted by Ravi Raja on 2003-02-27 20:25:34