Shoot your mate – game theory on TV shows
You are undercover and about to make a breakthrough with a mob boss. But your partner, not knowing your mission, tries to save you and gets captured. The boss suspects you might be working with the authorities. He asks you to prove your allegiance. He gives you a gun and requests you shoot ...

Answer to puzzle leaving work quickly
This post explains the solution to the puzzle posted on Monday called leaving work quickly. Okay, so sorry to keep changing the format of the Monday puzzle and solution. It's a work in progress so let me explain my logic. (And please forgive a broken link or two as I'm figuring ...

Monday puzzle: leaving work quickly
Alice and Bob were ready to leave the office when their mean boss assigned them more work. The boss told them to do the following boring things before they could go home: 1. Manually copy pages from bound books 2. Audit numbers in a spreadsheet 3. Fax documents to another office Each task takes 40 ...

Puzzle: ant and honey
The shortest distance between two points on a plane is a straight line. But finding the shortest distance on other surfaces is a more interesting problem. Here is a puzzle that is harder than it sounds:

Puzzle: mischievous child
Kids can sometimes get out of control at parties, and today's puzzle is about a child that finds it amusing to mess with the drink setup. Here is the puzzle:

Monday puzzle: hide and seek with a twist
I came across this fun puzzle over at MathOverflow: A princess inhabits a flight of 17 rooms in a row. Each room has a door to the outside, and there is a door between adjacent rooms. The princess spends each day in a room that is adjacent to the room she ...

Monday puzzle: train station pickup
This is a fun little puzzle about commuting from the train station. Mr. Smith, a commuter, is picked up each day at the train station at exactly 5 o'clock. One day he arrived at the train station unannounced at 4 o'clock and began to walk home. Eventually he met the chauffeur ...

Monday puzzle: paying an employee in gold
In honor of Labor day, I thought I would offer the following interview brain teaser as today's puzzle. You have a solid gold bar, marked into 7 equal divisions as follows: | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | You need to pay an employee each ...

How many pairs of underwear should you own?
Laugh it up. But I am sure you have thought about this very question at some point. Sure, you may not remember your reasons, and I doubt you wrote down the logic to derive an answer as I did. But since you own underwear, you must have had some reasons behind ...