Question :
There are 1000 wine bottles. One of the bottles contains poisoned wine. A rat dies after one hour of drinking the poisoned wine. How many minimum rats are needed to figure out which bottle contains poison in hour.
Solution :
We need to figure out in hour. We need 10 rats to figure out the poisoned bottle. The result is based on binary number system. We get 10 using ⌈Log(base 2)1000⌉.
The idea is to number bottles from 1 to 1000 and write their corresponding binary numbers on the bottle. Each rat is assigned a position in the binary numbers written on bottles. Let us take an example. Rat 1 represents first bit in every bottle, rat 2 represents second bit and so on. If rat numbers 5, 7 and 9 die, then bottle number 42 (Binary 0000101010) is poisoned.
