Summer Puzzle

The Summer Puzzle is available at the URL linked here. Enjoy!

(1) Mallika is in Java but can't take her mind off football. She is trying to decide between three football teams to throw her support behind – the University of Oklahoma Sooners, the University of Texas Longhorns and the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers. All she has to help her is a fair coin, that is, with this coin, there is an equal probability that the coin will show up either heads or tails. Devise a way for her to choose one of the three teams with equal probability.

(2) It is the next day and Mallika realizes that she has misplaced her fair coin. She is now trying to decide between five IPL teams - the Chennai Super Kings, the Kolkata Knight Riders, the
Mumbai Indians, the Rajasthan Royals and the Delhi Daredevils. All she has to help her is a coin with unknown bias, that is, with this coin, there is a non-zero probability that the coin will show up either heads or tails but we don’t know what the probability of heads is. Devise a way for her to choose one of the five teams with equal probability.

Email your answers to : askthedelphicoracle AT gmail DOT com with the subject : "Summer Puzzle".

Pizza and Panini

The "Pizza and Panini" column is available at the link here. The puzzle to solve is the one below. So, pick a number from 1 to 20. And email your answers to : askthedelphicoracle@gmail.com with the Subject : "Whiling the days away on Chandrayaan 12".

 (Whiling the days away on Chandrayaan 12) The astronauts on board Chandrayaan 12 are busy aboard their ship taking care of business, but they are also trying to challenge their minds a bit to keep their minds active. Some are solving crossword puzzles to keep their little grey cells from going to rust. Others are doing Sudoku. And some others are sending each other mathematical puzzles. Here is the latest one.

The astronauts had to hurry upstairs for a drill earlier that day and had to pick up their boots on the way up the spiral stairway. The boots were in a closet, and you could not see inside the boot closet because it was dark inside. All you could do was to feel around and pick up a boot. When it was the last astronaut's turn, what was left in the boot drawer were ten left boots and ten right boots. That is, twenty boots in all that are all the right size for her. What is the minimum number of boots N that the astronaut would have to pick up to be certain that she had a pair of boots that could be worn - one left and one right? Note that these boots would have to be complementary, that is, one left and one right. Further, note that the astronaut has to be certain that she had a complementary pair of boots. Note also that the number N is not equal to two. If the number N were equal to 2, then this would mean that every time the astronaut would pick up N = 2 boots, she would be certain that she had a complementary pair of boots, but this is not the case because the first two boots she picked up might turn out to be left boots. In this puzzle, we want a single number as the answer.

Send your answers to: askthedelphicoracle@gmail.com with the Subject: "Whiling the days away on Chandrayaan 12".

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