There are 1000 bottles of wine and you know that there is exactly one of them that is poisonous, and will kill the drinker in 7 days. (To be precise, it will take randomly from 7 days to 7 days 23 hr 59 min 59 sec.) Now you have 10 testers who are willing to risk their lives and test-drink those wines. What is the smallest number of days you need to figure out which bottle contains the poisonous wine? In addition, under this strategy, what is the maximum and minimum number of deaths? The extension to this problem is, how will your strategy change if you only have 9 testers?

Minimum No. of days required=7.
The ith drinker will drink every bottle whose ith LSB is 1.
Using this strategy, Minimum No. of deaths=0
Maximum = 9
If there are 9 testers, 14 days are required.

Edited on August 20, 2007, 8:48 am

Posted by Praneeth on 2007-08-20 08:47:45