20 November 2020

Puzzles in a Singapore class

Yesterday, my blog reminded me of this incident from seven years back when my friend from Singapore – Jyotsna – had pointed out that puzzles from my blog were being discussed in the classes of Singapore. And she asked me to post more.

So, here goes a fairly interesting puzzle:

Imagine a pharmaceutical company in a race to find a cure for coronavirus. It has come up with 1000 chemical formulas as potential anti-virus vaccinations. Those chemical formulas are sitting as solutions in 1000 different beakers in their lab.

However, only 1 of them is effective. In fact, it is supereffective. Even a small trace of it injected in a rat’s body will extinguish the virus within 7 days. The other 999 are of no use. They also know that you can mix those chemical formulas up and the resultant concoction will retain all the properties of the original formulas. Put simply, in a combination of solutions, if you have even a little of the effective formula, the whole combination is supereffective. Else, any combination of those other 999 solutions is totally useless.

One catch is that the pharma company has exactly 7 days to win the race to a vaccination. Which means it gets only one time to inject rats with the various combinations of the chemicals and see what happens by the 7th day.

As if that was not enough, there is way too much demand for rats – apparently lots of pharma companies are trying to do experiments for the vaccination.

Finally, they have to find out the exact solution with the effective chemical formula – there is enough manufacturing capability to make only one of those solutions in a scaled manner.

What is the minimum number of rats the company has to procure to conclusively prove which one of the chemical formula is the ultimate solution against the virus? How would they do the experiment?

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14 November 2020

I wish I had this for my skateboarding

I was walking the trail when I spotted what looked like a very odd looking small turtle crossing the concrete surface. As I came within a spitting distance, I realized that it was indeed a turtle. It had a leaf stuck on the outer side of the shell – which made it look odd. It had completely withdrawn itself inside the shell when it saw me approach.

I stood there, determined to win the game of patience and see what it would do once it realized that it was approaching a steep fall. You see the ground on the other side of the concrete trail had eroded thanks to the sharp flowing waters after the recent rains. The turtle’s only option would be to turn back or keep walking along the the edge till it could smoothly transition back into the ground.

Eventually, the turtle got out of its shell, under the mistaken notion that I was a permanent fixture. And kept plodding to the aforementioned edge of the concrete surface.

You have to watch the video to see what it did. Of course, it immediately stopped in its stride moment the left front foot found no ground under it. It took a second to think, stuck out the same foot again and tested out the air in the missing ground.

Convinced now that there is a big hole – it did a remarkable thing. No coming back. No walking along. It simply somersaulted and took a tumble. You will note how it safely landed on its hard shell at the end and then turned over and nonchalantly kept walking like nothing had happened.

I need a shell like that for my skateboarding!!!

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