/sci/ - Science & Math

>>8637529
Bruh, what kind of poison is it?

Not enough information.

You could bullshit all sorts of answers and have no way of knowing if it's the intended one.

Have your army of robot chemists (You didn't say I don't have them) run them all through a mass spectrometer (I have one of them too)

Check the mass spec for anything not wine.

>>8637529
>Without harming anyone
Like the Pagan gods of old, Science demands
sacrifice, and sacrifice must be made.

We can mix all barrels together and hope that concentration will be too low to kill anybody.

Throw the barrels in a titanic mass spectrometer. If the poison has different density from wine, it will stand out in the barrel spectrum.

>>8637529
buy 500 more barrels because I'm king
sell the others off to peasants in the hinterlands

>>8637529
but anon, wine already contains poison to start with, though a weak one

>>8637529
>How can he find the poisoned barrel in 48 hours

Drink from each barrel, one by one, and if the king drops dead, he's found the barrel.

>>8637529
feed some of ever barrel to the rats and see which died

or do what >>8637557
said

This is so fucking vague! Is this a mathematical problem or does it want a practical solution?

>>8637529
Get 50 servants with 50 rats and have the servants have each rat drink a little bit of each then wait like 2-10 hours for something to die. 1 of the 50 would die and then I would have 10 servants with 10 more rats and pair them with each of the 10 barrels from the original rat that died and have each of the rats drink, one would die and that would be my barrel, and it would take (assuming it took 15 minutes for each rat to drink each round) 4.5-20.5 hours, which is all before 48.

If rats died from alcohol anyway I could just use dogs although that makes me feel bad.

>>8637635
Actually the OP is a practical problem.

You have problem, a desire not to harm and a time limitation, just like real life. Just like real life you don't have enough information to solve without finding more out and leveraging undeclared assets.

>>8637727
>a desire not to harm

not stated in the problem

Without OP's bullshit added rule, the king could just serve the wine.

>>8637529
get 500 peasants and order each one to drink a cup from different barrel.
The one that drops dead, drank from the poisoned barrel.
Other 499 are so fucking jolly, to be invited by the king, to have a cup of wine, that they immediately forget the fact about cruel experiments.

depending on the strength of the poisen just mix them all together and server.

>>8637739
best answer

King could continue to poison all wine in the kingdom with slightly increasing amounts of poison till everyone in the kingdom were immune to the poison

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3qmN6pYhi0 Binary

>>8637779
is that a real game?

>>8637780
I am not a man of mathematics and could only come up with the first method. But the second one is amazing. I mean, this is really cool stuff, which just shows how imagination and creativity can help to solve problems in life.

>>8637780
That's an interesting trick but, if you're just going to give it to rats in the first place, why don't you just do it brute force?

>>8637814
Because OP didn't set the problem up correctly.

>>8637815
I think that is just some troll, there would constantly pop up threads with problems which have incomplete set ups or are just ambiguous.
Then he just waits and masturbates.

>>8637635
I could see how it wants a practical solution, but who the fuck has 500 barrells of wine laying around, where one of them is poisoned?

>>8637529

find about 9 rats

then do a binary search for the barrel by mixing wine from each half and feeding it to the rats

>needing a binary search tree
he's a fucking king he can just order 500 people to drink from the casks

>>8637779
>>8637788
nah, it's a thing some artist did for zozzles
>https://judebuffum.wordpress.com/2012/08/01/the-battle-of-wits-crazy-4-cult-ny/

>>8637809
Me either, just a dude who likes to watch maths YouTubes and masturbate intermittently.

>>8637529
fill a bottle with wine from ten different consecutive barrels, repeat this until you have 50 wine bottles

give tastes of the wine to prisoners or mice

when one of them is affected by poison repeat the same process of each barrel that was used for the wine

>>8637580
The poison could take minutes or even hours to take effect. You'd only know that the barrel was one of the ones the king had drank from.

Have your manservant fuccboi taste all the barrels until he dies.

Isn't this sort of similar to that problem everyone does in diff eq, the brine problem where you have to model equations to describe the rate of flow of clean water into the barrel of brine, and the rate of flow out of the barrel (or something like that)

Not enough information to do this problem obviously though.

>>8638010
>Isn't this sort of similar to that problem everyone does in diff eq, the brine problem where you have to model equations to describe the rate of flow of clean water into the barrel....
Nope

>>8638015
You could dilute the poison until it's no longer harmful

>>8638027
yes, if you had infinite ammount of wine. But then, you could just purge all the barrels.
The problem is entirely different.

>>8638037
For some reason I was thinking about water and not wine

>>8637780
Yeah I've seen this problem before. Let's make it interesting by saying you have two hours instead of one. What's the minimum amount of mice you need then?

So in the first hour you would want to narrow the field down without killing all your mice. Then the second step would be the normal technique with your remaining mice.

You could further generalize this to n hours.

>>8638093
Or maybe just figure out who's selling you poisoned wine and stop buying from him.

>>8637529
Throw away his "wants" and throw away the wine and serve healthy, clean, crisp, clear water. Wine is poison to our bodies anyway: and turns idiots into bigger idiots.

>>8637529
This was covered on infinite series. Something about using a binary sequence to track which barrels kill mice.

>>8638114
Throwing away the blood of our lord savior..

>>8637529

This wouldn't work if all of them were poison and you were trying to find the non poison one.

Pick a barrel at random. Either it's poisoned or it's not, so the probability is 1/2.

Pick another barrel. Again, either it's poisoned or it's not, so the probability is 1/2.

1/2+1/2=1, so one of those 2 barrels is definitely poisoned.

You now just need two mice to test each barrel.

>>8637529
Invite the peasants as they aren't people punish those who get poisoned for defaming GOD.

this is proof that math isn't as smart as history harumpf

>>8638425
Wait. You just need one mouse.

Test one of the two barrels, if the mouse dies then that was the poisoned one, if it doesn't then it must be the other barrel.

>>8637529
Give a glass of wine from each barrel to a different mature sheep. Remove the barrel corresponding to the sheeo that dies, sheer the sheep, and distribute a wool sock to each of the partygoes as comemmoration of the event.

>>8637529
Tell the cleric to prepare Detect Poison and check every barrel until we find the poisoned one.
We will take our reward in wine your majesty, thank you.

>>8637529
The generic algorithm for this is (very) easy high-school level stuff bored guys encounter (figure out for themselves most likely) most of the time while doing programming challenges (and other math based optimization challenges).

1. Divide the barrels you're currently unsure about into two groups. (In the beginning this is all barrels; 250-250.)
2. Make two mixes corresponding to the groups.
3. Check both mixes.
4. Select the group which gave positive result.
5. Is the positive group small enough for individual tests if that's our goal (depending on available resources) or is it consists of only one barrel? If that's the case STOP the algorithm and test the barrel(s).
6. GOTO 1

This will divide the group by 2^n, which converges very quickly.
To simplify for our example let's say that the amount of barrels we have is a power of two. 16384/(2^14) = 1. We will reach conclusion in 14 steps which means 14 test subjects. We can also optimize the algorithm to discard more than one barrel if the group is sufficiently small compared to the whole, like 10%.

>Without harming anyone?
I don't know. I'm not sure that's part of the original problem.
From a quick glance I see multiple solutions:
- You could produce a mix from enough barrels so the poison is no longer harmful.
- Use small animals for testing like rats, mouse, etc. Lot of poisons depend on body weight.
Neither of these two find the barrel though.
- A good trick would be assuming that the king knows who poisoned it (or at least he knows which group of staff has the culprit) is to have his staff (all potential poisoners) taste the wine before serving it. They can't serve from the same barrel twice unless there are no remaining untouched barrels. Obviously the poisoner won't drink the wine, except if he's ready to die for his cause.

>>8637529
Sell these to communists and buy 500 more.

the most realistic answer is that the king just dumps the wine barrels and then gets new ones since he can't harm anyone

>>8638507
nice

>>8637557
>>8637779
this is just stupid enough to work

>>8637576
>>8638114
waterfags get out

>>8637580
>>8637736
>>8637892
>>8637857
>>8637993
>>8638516
>without harming anyone

>>8637529
Serve the barrels anyway.

The king didn't put the poison in the barrels, so technically he did not harm anyone.

The poison will then be discovered anyway, when the barrel is drank from.

>>8637529
Serve beer or mead.

>>8639176

This. Wine is gross anyway.

>>8637557
all of the king's guests leave because he mixed all of the merlot, chardonnay and champagne together and it tastes like shit

try again

>>8637529

I can expend 5 servants and bring our time down to 4 hours.

Also you did the problem wrong. You didn't specify that it takes up to one hour for the poison to take affect.

>>8637780

When they brought out the rats, I immediately thought of that one decision game from ZTD, where Team C had to figure out which phial among 10 had the antidote. Seeing how they described the same algorithm in mathematical terms made me appreciate that one segment a lot more.

>>8639186
I laughed heartily.

Good show. What have the jesters got in store for us tonight?

There's some kind of emergent pattern if you label the bottles in binary, hold up lemme find this video.

here it is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3qmN6pYhi0

its a great channel imo. really, all of the pbs yt channels are good. they tread lightly into popsci but always keep it informative.

>>8639215
also i already claimed kelsey as my waifu.

>>8637529
By using binary numbers and ten small animals, say ten mouse(because small dosage of poison will also be deadly for a small animal). Label a number to every bottle and convert that number to binary. Than make those animals to stand in a row and make those animals which are standing in same position as position of one from left to right in the binary codeb to drink a small amount of wine . After observing which of those animals got poisoned, we can know the binary code of poisoned bottle.

>>8637529
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N3qmN6pYhi0

test a cup of each on prisioners, problem solved. you have 499 happy prisoners, and one less mouth to fee of someone who was goign to be killed anyways

>>8637544

this.

>>8637529
Mass spectroscopy of each wine barrel

>>8637780
damn

>>8639240
there was nothing in the question by OP about rats REEEE

Binary Search Tree

>>8637529
Find the open one?

>>8639321
Kek this guy, MS on each barrel in 48 hours. You will destroy our kingdom!

>>8639411
depending on the column, method, and the mass spec itself it is definitely possible. it's just under 6 minutes per run, and that's assuming you have to run all 500 which you very likely won't.

>>8639421
Haha so first do the right research for the right method and than analyze all the compounds in all barrels. No just find the open one, its a lot easier.

>>8637529
he doesn't. He simply dilutes every barrel down to 0.2% of it's original content. That should be workable.

>>8637529
>>8637544
Alcohol is a poison
All the barrels are poisoned by technicality.

>>8639215
explain how any mathematical system helps find a random barrel in a more efficient manner than checking them 1 by 1

>>8639093
>>without harming anyone
show me where do you see this proposition in op's picture
else
choke on cock

>>8637529
Two words: Molecular Analysis

can you prove me wrong?

>pro tip: you can't

>>8637529
Have a slave drink from each barrel, obviously.

>>8637529
>Without harming anyone?

remove wine, drink water instead.

>>8639439
that's also assuming you only have one mass spec. if you have 500 that's not a problem.

>>8637780
I'd mix one drop for each bottle with all of the other bottles so every bottle had a small amount of poison. By drinking that diluted poison mixture, everyone would get immune to the poison. Homeopathy, bitches.

>>8638509
it's possible to find the solution with 9 rats, each of them only drinking once and at the same time

>>8637529
Mix all of the 500 barrels.
The poison Is diluted by at 500 times.
The king should feel safe to serve the wine knowing that no poison known to man is able to kill if diluted to such degree.

>>8640795
>It's a homeopathic poison
>It's still far too strong
>Everyone dies
Well done

>>8637529
binary search.
mix samples of 250 barrels together, check for poison.
Then 125.
Then 63/62

etc.

This is the fastest way. Of course the question doesn't give us anything to work with, so the 48 hours bit is useless information. It should just read "as fast as reasonably possible"

You could test 500 barrels for poison in 8 hours, its literally what QA people do.

>>8637529
You get 500 prisoners on death row. You offer them a pardon if they each drink from 1 barrel of wine.

Technically you haven't harmed anyone. You have saved 499 lives. The poisoned guy was going to die anyway. You just moved up his execution date.

>>8640076
In op's actual post. Can you even read?

>>8637529
How much poison are we talking about? Is there enough poison in the wine barrel to be at a lethal concentration?

Why even bother finding the poisoned barrel if there isn't even enough poison in the wine to kill someone?

>>8640849

except for the people harmed by the marauding horde of 499 rapists and murderers pardoned.

>>8637550
>Check the mass spec for anything not wine.
>Because all wines are the same and wine has a well behaved mass spectrum

boi...

>>8637529
Easy, mix it all together. The poison will be so diluted that it does not matter now.

>>8638456
no the other barrel is 1/2 poison so u have to check it

>>8638456
what if the poison takes a long time to act.....

>>8637529
This is a classic OR (operations research) / DOE (design of experiments) question.

Usually it is phrased better, with it asking the fewest number of tests needed to pick the correct barrel.

Say you are a consultant and are paid big bucks to come in and determine the absolute minimum number of trials to absolutely determine the poisoned barrel. To test for the poison may cost a lot and it is best to do it cheaply. Also assume the wine/poison is fully mixed, so sampling from the barrel will yield a poisoned sample.

The correct answer is log_base2 (n) where n is the number of barrels. It is set up like
>>8638509
said.

Fun problem, hope I get to do this some day at my job because so many dumbshits would just brute force this problem and test all of the barrels because "muh 50% probability, test them all"

>>8637575
>tfw peasant and live in the hinterlands

>>8639321
>2017
>still calling it spectroscopy
Fuck off

I'd be more concerned about who keeps poisoning my fucking barrels of wine.

I'd gather all the potential suspects, the delivery men, the caskers, the farmers, everyone.

I would make them select a cask to drink from
The ones who drop dead were most likely innocent
The ones who are alive are still suspects

You narrow the suspects down to 400
You have one hour to find the poisoner
You can only kill one, and the chamber torture Barron is on vacation
the suspects are not prone to bribery and they all claim innocence
If you don't find the poisoner the villagers will become unruly and capture you, and the Barron of torture returns from vacation immediately

What do?

>>8637780

>>8637529
obviously just have luck maxed out and where the amulet of good fortune (+2 to luck)

>>8637780
>And now the Party is saved!
>implying a party so large that needs 1,000 bottles of wine would care if one person died
it'd probably make the party better

>>8641179
But can you devise those (9) tests such that their inputs are not dependent on any other test's output; i.e. can be run simultaneously?

>>8637780
>peta shows up to the party and sees a bunch of dead rats
>they get mad and ruin the party anyway

>>8641074
You don't actually have to pardon them. You could just lie

>>8639186
It's called sangria

>>8641208

hey, why does't anyone want to sell or deliver wine to us anymore?

>>8645160
The one who poisoned the wine is the wine seller, its the only answer.

>>8637809
To be fair, no one came up with the solution to the problem with creativity. The mathematical phenomena was discovered and then the problem derived from it.

Boil a sample of each barrel. The sample with the differing boil temp is the poisoned one

>>8646373

Oh! I like this. That is creative. I doubt it would be practical and probably the different boiling points would be negligible, but that is definitely more fun than the contrived binary solution.

Give the wine to zygotes. Zygotes aren't people and therefore no one will be harmed when one of them dies from poison.

>>8646397

Bring out the wenches! Panties off for the king!

My ex was developing this neat chemical strip for the government that would detect if water was drinkable. It did not use zygotes but did have similar tech.

>>8637780
>>8639215
Her accent, I'm in love. Where in the US do I need to go to to be surrounded by women that talk with that accent?

>>8646435
Midwest.

>>8637529
By not serving any wine from the kings cellar, just go out and buy new wine and test the shit later.

>>8646435
........! ty!

>>8642043
No

>>8637780

>sci shits on computer science, but gets amazed at freshman comp sci 101

I can only imagine how bad american education really is

>>8639186
The king tells the guests it's super ancient fancy wine from some obscure vineyard in France

Guests trip over themselves praising the wine because double blind studies show so called expert taste testers ratings are almost entirely influenced by how fancy the label is

>>8637780
The solution I came up with would be to give

Rat 1: Bottles 1-500
Rat 2: Bottles 1-250 and 500-750
Rat 3: Bottles 1-125, 250-375, 500-625, 750-875
Rat 4: 1-63, 125-188, ...
And so forth

That's the same thing, right?

Use a silver spoon to test that is how people did it historically. All commonly used poisons contain sulfur which will react with the silver and turn it black.

Just like, don't drink any of it. Jesus man, have a beer

>>8646590
Essentially, if slightly reversed from the exact binary solution.

Rat 1: 512-1000
Rat 2: 256-511, 768-1000
Rat 3: 128-255, 384-511, 640-767, 896-1000
etc.

>>8646541
But you can!

>>8646543
Please don't use this as a reason to shit on people spending more than the absolute minimum on wine. The effect really only kicks in between "kinda expensive" bottles and expensive bottles.

>>8646543
That's studies between decent wine and good wine, not between good wine and a shit mix of different stuff like champagne + malbec you autist

he discards the current 500 barrels and buys another 500 barrels and instructs his guardsmen to keep a keen eye over anyone who goes near them so as they are not poisoned again.

he is a king after all, he should have a large enough treasury to cover the cost.

>>8637529
force feed the wine to mice
record the LD50s

/thread

>>8646802
>also

>>8646697
>using the O(log n) solution instead of the O(1) solution when each step in complexity is probably going to take hours
REEEEE

Just get a rat for every barrel

>>8637529
Really depends on the poison. If you have absolutely no clue what poison it is, then you should test:
1. Smell
2. Color, viscosity and general appearance
3. Taste (small amount, don't swallow and rinse your mouth thoroughly, maybe get a servant for this)
4. Rub it on your skin and look for a reaction

But unless you get more specific, there is really no definite way to find the poison without a lab.

Best answer so far >>8637557

I think it's much simpler than that. Open all the barrels and put them on sun or something so wine goes bad and smells. The barrel which smells has poison. Also, question doesn't ask for wine to be conserved, it just asks to find the poison

>>8646668
Thanks

I see a few other people have watched PBS Infinite Series

>>8637529
Mix all barrels, poison will have diluted down to safe levels, serve the wine.

Find the origin of the poison rumor and grill him. He's obviously part of the plot to get everyone to not notice the assassin with the knife.

>>8647509
>I see a few other people have watched the youtube video linked in this thread
ftfy

>>8637529
Most of you are retarded. Weigh the fucking barrels. Chances are the poison weighs a different amount than the wine.

>>8647608
Oh? I didn't see it was linked.

>>8641130
>>8640795
>>8637557

Some poisons, like botulinum toxin, are deadly in unimaginably tiny doses.

If the poisoner dosed their barrel with a massive excess in order to guarantee death (still a tiny amount of botulinum), then the dilution is irrelevant, and you're just killing everyone at the banquet anyway.

>>8647625
Wine barrels are handcrafted and don't weigh the same amount every time, also they don't always contain the same amount of wine. What you proposing would only work with modern mass produced product.

>>8641114
you can still check the spectrum for any poisonous chemicals. As long as any toxic chemicals are below lethal levels you can serve the wine.

>>8647625

>chances
Good news, sir. Chances are that this food I'm serving you isn't poisoned.

>>8637619
not too good at following instructions are you

>>8640849
they were on death row, they mall be murderers, or worse litter bugs.
Let them celebrate their victory with the poisoned barrel.

>>8637529
pick one at random and say that is the one with poison.

in some quantum multi-verse you would be correct.

>>8637779
That's not how immunity works senpai.

>>8637544
Only correct answer is to have a peasant try each barrel.

>>8638456
What if the mouse is teetotal?

>>8637818

I dont think its so much that, rather there are many genuinely retarded people, semi-illiterates and 12 year olds residing on 4chan. I mean, just look at some of the comments.
Therefore OP watches the vid, hell, it may have been while at school, fails to comprehend, then the problem gets mangled through retard/autism/underage filter (pick one or more) and ends up here in its final glorious form.

invade russia untill we find who poisioned the wine

>>8648525
No need. Trump poisoned his own wine. 4d chess and all that jazz.

>>8648498
You mean one peasant for each barrel? Otherwise you will have useless results.

>>8637529
Pour a cup of wine out of each into a uniform potted plant. Look for the plant that died in the 24 hours. Confirm by retesting the poisoned sample(s) several times over the next 24 hours

Drink from every barrel except one (the one that's poisoned). That way you know every other barrel is safe without anyone getting hurt.

>>8637529
Is the barrel poisoned or the wine contained within the barrel?

>>8648686
>500 barrels of wine but one contains poison

You open up all the barrels and take a look/decant a little of each.

The question says that the barrel contains poison. I don't think there's any poison that looks and smells like wine.

>>8648800
It didn't say it ONLY contains poison

>>8637529
Why would he worry about not harming anyone? He's a fucking king. Line up the peasants.

buy 500 barrels from another winery and burn down the other for shipping poisoned caskets to the king

>>8637529

Mix all the wine into a single huge vat. Good luck poisoning me when you're diluted by 500 times, faggot!

>>8637529
Find the king and tell him that it is impractical to serve 500 barrels of wine even for a presumed party and convince him that it would be much more reasonable to serve only a couple barrels for each type of wine, asking notable guests which sorts they prefer most to gain favor.
There is now a lower chance of the poison barrel being chosen and the people who enjoy the wine would complain that the smell is off and likely discard the wine. Barring that if you know a barrel is poisoned you know would probably know which one is, but if its done without your knowing odds are you won't be testing it. If you're paranoid and do test it, use animals the day before by mixing 50-100 barrels samplings into mixed drinks and seeing which batches kill animals, narrow it down as best as you can then don't serve the lethal batch.

can it all, 1drop of poison is no good.

He's a king, surely he can buy 500 barrels of new untainted wine.

>>8637529
very simple

take a sample of each barrel and test it for said poison

done

>>8650457
The more diluted it gets, the more potent it becomes
>source: homeopathy

>>8651480
So if the King does not serve the wine at all, everybody will die!

>>8651480
>everyone's illnesses get healed by homeopathicly deluted poison
>king becomes most popular man ever

>>8637529
Take 9 rats, assign each rat a digit 1-9, assign each barrel a number, and make a rat drink from the barrel if the binary representation of the barrel's number is 1, and not if it's a 0. then the rats that die will correspond to the number of the barrel that's poisoned

>>8651502
yes, that is why everyone is struggling to find a solution to this problem.

>>8646705
>>8646543
I think it would be the "emperor's new clothes" kind of thing. No one would want to insult the king's wine that they'd convince themselves it's good.

>>8650397
Why the fuck would he invite peasants to his banquet?

>>8637529
Hold a free wine tasting.

Oh! I remember this problem from The Labyrinth.

Ask each barrel if the others are lying.

>>8651617
>Oh! I remember this problem from The Labyrinth.

>Ask each barrel if the others are lying.

>>8646373
You're assuming that all the wine is the same

just kill the jews

>>8637780
>thought it would be a fun little math riddle
>not even highschool tier
damn i even stopped the video to write down the numbers, what a dissapointing one minute that was

>>8638425
Probability is 1/500 retard. Thats not how it works

>>8637529
Get 500 slaves and give each one a glass of wine from a different barrel, see who dies.