Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Use your brain!

Now you got me thinking of a riddle I saw on a website a while ago, and could not figure out:

I have two dozen doors that lead to nowhere.

answer?

any guesses?

The Winchester Mystery House?

Doors themselves never lead anywhere; doorways do.

Blimey, I'm stumped (Doesn't take much anyways ...)

You've got a solution to this one? Or does someone just says there is one? I imagine you separate the balls into 3 groups and you have to mix and match them for the 2nd and 3rd weighings but can't get the math to work ....

I have the solution! (Ok, so I found it. ) Lemme know when you want it.

The secret lies in assigning each ball a unique "code" made up of the 3 positions that it can occupy during each use of the scale: left, right, or set aside.

Yeah, I did that -- 3 groups each (A, B, C) and each ball is numbered (A1, A2 .... C3, C4).

You weigh 2 groups first and leave one group off, then the second time you mix and match all 12 balls (hence the numbering). Right? Well at least I'm on the right track, right ...

Here's a new one, I'm not sure if it's solvable...if it is I've never been able to figure it out. Take a piece of paper and draw 3 houses (a square with a triangle on top of it). Then put the letters G, O, and W on the paper. These stand for Gas, Oil, and Water. Draw a line from the gas to each house, oil to each, and water to each. The catch is, the lines from different sources cannot cross each other. I'd post a picture but don't have a web server to do it from. I'd love to know the solution if anyone can figure it out and post a picture of the solution, or a proof that it can't be solved if it can't.

The only criteria is that you can not cross different sources. Gas is crossing itself.

That's the closest I have come. I'm looking for a way to do it where you can't run lines through the houses like you did with Gas.

Oil?