Puzzles
I've been sending out weekly puzzles to a number of people. If you are interested, by the way, drop me an email and I'll add you to the list.
The puzzle that least people have solved so far is this one:
A 1000 Conquistadors have stolen the treasure of El Dorado, and want to divide it between themselves.
The conquest has left them all greedy, heartless, and extremely pragmatic.
The 1000 Conquistadors were formed over a number of years, and are ranked in the order they joined; the earliest first all the way down to the newest, 1000.
They have decided to split the treasure via a vote. Everyday, they will kill the lowest ranker, or split the treasure up between the survivors.
If 50% or more vote to split, the treasure gets split, or else they kill the lowest ranker and repeat the process until half or more of the survivors decide to split the treasure.
At what point will the treasure be split?
It's quite fun once you work out the answer :-)
The puzzle that least people have solved so far is this one:
A 1000 Conquistadors have stolen the treasure of El Dorado, and want to divide it between themselves.
The conquest has left them all greedy, heartless, and extremely pragmatic.
The 1000 Conquistadors were formed over a number of years, and are ranked in the order they joined; the earliest first all the way down to the newest, 1000.
They have decided to split the treasure via a vote. Everyday, they will kill the lowest ranker, or split the treasure up between the survivors.
If 50% or more vote to split, the treasure gets split, or else they kill the lowest ranker and repeat the process until half or more of the survivors decide to split the treasure.
At what point will the treasure be split?
It's quite fun once you work out the answer :-)
posted by dan at
1:50 pm
1 Comments:
Well, forgive me if I'm reading the question wrong but it seems that the #1 pirate can allocate himself the entire booty without fear of ever getting the chop. (Sketchy) proof follows...
Consider a satisfactory case (i.e. gets voted through) with n pirates with all the booty claimed by the #1 pirate. (Case where n=1 is trivially true.)
Now with n+1 pirates we allocate the (n+1)th pirate nothing and, should his extra vote be enough to tip the vote towards 50% not accepting then he wouldn't vote this way else he'd get the chop.
Jake Martin
arctangent.gmail@com
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Anonymous, at 6:27 pm
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