Into a hat you place four slips of paper. One has a gold star, one has a red X, and the other two are blank.

Each round will proceed as follows: Each person will select a piece of paper from the hat. Whichever player chooses the slip with the red X joins the "team" of the player who chooses the slip with the gold star. Then all four slips are returned to the hat and the process is repeated. The game ends when all four players are on the same team.

1) On average, how many rounds will the game last until all four players are on the same team?

2) Find a general solution for n players (where the hat contains one gold star, one red X, and n-2 blank slips).

Interesting.

I also pressed Push on this. Apparently one of us pushed it live and the other one's was ignored as it was already pushed. I didn't get the usual message of the order of "can't push a new one, as one was pushed in the previous 20 minutes". Perhaps levik has a check in there for already-pushed puzzles, or the machine just ignores pushes for puzzles that are no longer in the queue.