A king has 1000 bottles of wine, exactly one of which is poisoned. The poison takes exactly 24 hours to kill. You have 24 hours and 10 prisoners willing to help. How do you identify the poisoned bottle?
Hints
Use binary representation—each prisoner represents a binary digit.
Answer
Number bottles 0-999 in binary (10 bits). Each prisoner represents one bit position. Give prisoner 1 wine from all bottles with bit 1 set, prisoner 2 from all bottles with bit 2 set, etc. After 24 hours, the pattern of which prisoners died gives you the binary number of the poisoned bottle.