I hate to bring this up again but it seems like there are some conmen out there who aren’t really Endgame readers but who see in it a good and constant source of email IDs which they can subsequently prey upon. Two more people have brought this to my attention lately saying they’re now not only being inundated by spam but also harassed. So my suggestion to you wis if you don’t want this kind of unnecessary attention then let me know not to mention your email ID. Meanwhile . . .
A bag contains one counter, which may be either black or white. A second counter, which is definitely white, is put into the bag. The bag is shaken and one counter taken out, which proves to be white. What is the probability of the next counter coming out of the bag also being white?
THROUGHPUT
(Yesterweek’s hassle was: “If pi is transcendental then any given digit should occur in it. And generalising, any given sequence of digits. Meaning any message can be found in pi. Pi contains all possible information in the universe. Where’s the flaw here?”)
Although any given message containing information can be coded into a combination or sequence of digits in pi, how would we know where that combination or sequence is in the infinite number of digits? This seems to be the flaw. -- Abhay Prakash, abhayprakash@hotmail.com
(The second problem was about a casino manager who wished to test the accuracy of his roulette wheel so he asked six croupiers to record the number of times each number came up and blah blah blah. You get the gist.)
This is regarding the perplexed Casino Manager. I took sets of four statements at a time, which made it a breeze to eliminate the combinations that don’t work. The only solution is for croupiers B and C to be lying. And the number is 12. It is even, has double digits, has a ‘2’ in it, and is between 5 and 15. -- J R K Rao, jrkrao@gmail.com
The answer is 12. There should be four true and two false statements. (1) If A and B are true then answer is to be 2 and all other 4 are false. Hence not correct. (2) A, C and D can be true and the answer can be 16 or 36 then others B, E and F are false. Hence not correct. (3) A, D, E and F can be true and the answer is 12. This is correct since it gives true and two false statements. -- - Raghavendra Rao Hebbani, rao.raghavendrah@gmail.com
Grouping the numbers into 1-4, 5-15, 16-36 and checking for more than 1, 2 and 1 false statements respectively for the groups we can eliminate the wrong numbers and the answer comes as 12. -- Abhishek Narayan, dudeabhi4u@gmail.com
(Among the first five who also got it correct are: Gadepalli Subrahmanyam, gsmani174@gmail.com; Balagopalan Nair K, balagopalannair@gmail.com; Dr P Gnanaseharan, gnanam.chithrabanu@gmail.com; Dhruv Narayan, dhruv510@gmail.com; Seshagiri Row Karry, srkarry@yahoo.com)
(The third one was: “What’s a 15-letter English word containing all the vowels where no letter is used more than once; and two eight-letter EWs that contain the first six letters of the alphabet?”)
UNCOPYRIGHTABLE is the 15 letter EW satisfying the conditions. If you relax the all vowel conditions, we have a beautiful word DERMATOGLYPHICS meaning the study of skin patterns in fingers and feet and its application. I have BOLDFACE and FEEDBACK for the second part. -- Saishankar Swaminathan, saishankar482@gmail.com
My answer is MISCONJUGATEDLY and UNCOPYRIGHTABLE. – Palicherlu V Prakash, pvprakaash@gmail.com (Yes, Rachana Prakash, you got it partially wrong too.)
(And again among the first blah blahs who also got it blah blah are: Narayana Murty Karri, k_n_murty@yahoo.com; J Vaseekhar Manuel, orcontactme@gmail.com; Cherian Joseph, cj_eph22@gmail.com; Venkateswaran R, venkateswaranjanaki@gmail.com; Hemalatha T, hemalatha1956@gmail.com)
BUT GOOGLE THIS NOW
1. You have a seven-litre and a five-litre jar and an unlimited supply of water. What’s the least number of steps it would take to give someone exactly FOUR litres of water if the seven-litre jar has to be filled first as step #1. And then starting from that exact configuration (without actually giving anyone any water, that is) you have to then give him or her a further THREE litres of water.
2. What’s the profession of the man who left home one day and made three left turns and met a person with a helmet on? (Terrible one, I know.)
Sharma is a scriptwriter and former editor of Science Today magazine.(mukul.mindsport@gmail.com)