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The prisoners and the beans (Posted on 2005-11-27) Difficulty: 3 of 5
Five prisoners are going to take beans from a bag with 100 beans. They will do it one prisoner at a time, and only once each. No communication is allowed between them, but they can count the beans left in the bag. All prisoners who end with the largest and the smallest number of beans will die.

Who is most likely to survive?

Assume:
1. they are all smart people.
2. they will try to survive first and then try to kill more people.
3. they do not need to take out all the 100 beans.

See The Solution Submitted by pcbouhid    
Rating: 3.8750 (16 votes)

Comments: ( Back to comment list | You must be logged in to post comments.)
Hints/Tips Beans? | Comment 5 of 43 |

what if the first guy takes 5 beans... then 95 are left for guy 2
if there are 95 left will he take 6 beans... or will he take 4... i think he will take the 6 this leaves 89...
now guy 3 is confused now cause he doesn't know who picked what i think he will go for picking 9 i think he thinks that the other guys picked 9 and 2 respectively no we are down to 80 beans...
guy 4 will see 80 he now knows that somewhere someone picked an odd number because no one can pick 6 2/3 beans so he thinks that if he picks 7 beans he will be safe and so he will be now we have 73 beans
guy 5 now sees a problem so he will pick another safe number he will go with 6 below the average but he hopes nothing will go wrong. in all i still stick with my assumption that guy 3 will be safest


  Posted by Matt Van Winkle on 2005-11-28 00:31:39
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