 We here at Athlinks believe in a strong healthy mind as well as a strong healthy body. With that stated, each month we will have a monthly puzzler for you to solve. We will provide the answer the following month (2nd or 3rd of each month). All you need to do is send your answer to us via email by the 23rd of each month with the subject line “Puzzler” and then all correct answers will have a chance to win one of our cool Athlinks water bottles! Winners will be selected at random.Good luck…August Puzzler:
You are a contestant on a game show. There are three closed doors in front of you. The game show hosts tells you that behind one of these doors is a million dollars in cash and that behind the other two doors there are goats. You do not know which doors contain which prizes but the game show host does. The game you are going to play is very simple: you pick one of the three doors and win the prize behind it. After you have made your selection, the game show host opens one of the two doors that you did not choose and reveals a goat. At this point you are given the option to either stick with your original door or switch your choice to the only remaining closed door. What would you do and why? Here’s the solution to last month’s puzzler: You can determine your three fastest horses in seven races. The first thing you have to do is split all of the horses into five groups of five and race them. You must keep track of the positions that each horse comes in. An easy way to do this is to label the races A, B, C, D, and E. Then you can label each horse according to the position they came in in the races. For example, the winning horse of race A would be labeled “A1” and the second place finisher would be “A2”, and so on. For the sixth race, you will race the top finishers of the original five races against each other (A1, B1, C1, D1, E1). The winner of this race is the fastest horse. As an example, let’s assume that the sixth race finished in the following order: D1, B1, A1, C1, E1. You know that C1 and E1 cannot be in the top three among all horses because they lost to D1, B1 and A1. You also know that C2-C5 and E2-E5 cannot be in the top three because they were all slower than C1 and E1. You also know that A2-A5 cannot be in the top three because they are slower than A1, B1 and D1. You also know that B3-B5 cannot be in the top three because they are slower than B2, B1 and D1. This leaves you only five possible horses that can contend for the second-fastest and third-fastest position: D2, D3, B1, B2, A1. Race these five horses against each other and the first and second place finishers are your second-fastest and third-fastest horses, respectively. |
Monthly Puzzler – August
