Supposedly this is given as a test in Japan. I have no idea if that’s accurate.
There are 8 people who have to cross the river on a raft.
1. Policeman
2. Thief
3. Father
4. Boy 1
5. Boy 2
6. Mother
7. Girl 1
8. Girl 2
The rules are:
Only two people can cross at a time.
Only the adults can operate the raft.
The father can’t be with the girls unless the mother is there.
The mother can’t be with the boys unless the father is there.
The thief can’t remain with anyone unless the policeman is present.
How do you get them all across?
Instead of working it out by hand, here’s a flash version.
Click on the circle to start. Click on a person to put them on the raft and click on the lever to make the raft cross.
Each entry is a letter, in alphabetical order starting with A, followed by the number of occurrences of that letter in the phrase “What is the secret to this”.
There’s one ‘a’, thus we get A1. There are no ‘b’s so it doesn’t appear, then there’s one ‘c’, and so on.
I’m found on a hand and also a tree,
You’ll find me on Sunday, occasionally,
Records, pictures, islands and brew,
From August to Wolfgang and Sago for you.
Fred was almost done packing for the day, with five packages left. Unfortunately, Fred dropped the labels and had no idea which label went to which package. What is the probability that Fred managed to correctly label exactly four of the five packages?
Zero. If Fred had correctly labeled four packages, the fifth label would belong to the fifth package and all packages would be correctly labeled. Therefore it is impossible to mislabel exactly four packages.