3 ms·

There is only 1 day. Wouldn't you just separate the bottles evenly across all the mice?

• paulgb 19y ago
  That way you could serve 900 bottles. Can you serve more? Hint: Look at the number of possible outcomes. In this case, each of the 10 mice can either live or die. That gives us 2^10 = 1024 possible outcomes. We can only encounter 1000 possible initial configurations of bottles. Is there a way to set it up so that each of the 1000 possible outcomes maps to an initial configuration?
  • colonhyphenp 19y ago
    I figured it out by thinking what would happen if you only had 1 mouse (500 bottles can make it to the party), then looking at the problem again with 2 mice (there's a way to prove that 750 bottles are poison-free using only 2 mice), etc. all the way up to 10 mice.