Problems

Age
Difficulty
Found: 1967

Two boys play the following game: they take turns placing rooks on a chessboard. The one who wins is the one whose last move leaves all the board cells filled. Who wins if both try to play with the best possible strategy?

A traveller who came to the planet hired a local as a guide. They went for a walk and saw another alien. The traveller sent the guide to find out to whether this native is a liar or truth teller. The guide returned and said: “The native says that they are a truth teller.” Who was the guide: a liar or a truth teller?

In a basket there are 13 apples. There are scales, with which you can find out the total weight of any two apples. Think of a way to find out from 8 weighings the total weight of all the apples.

A raisin bag contains 2001 raisins with a total weight of 1001 g, and no raisin weighs more than 1.002 g.

Prove that all the raisins can be divided onto two scales so that they show a difference in weight not exceeding 1 g.

10 numbers are written around the circle, the sum of which is equal to 100. It is known that the sum of every three numbers standing side by side is not less than 29.

Specify the smallest number \(A\) such that in any such set of numbers each of the numbers does not exceed \(A\).

A daisy has a) 12 petals; b) 11 petals. Consider the game with two players where: in one turn a player is allowed to remove either exactly one petal or two petals which are next to each other. The loser is the one who cannot make a turn. How should the second player act, in cases a) and b), in order to win the game regardless of the moves of the first player?

On the board the number 1 is written. Two players in turn add any number from 1 to 5 to the number on the board and write down the total instead. The player who first makes the number thirty on the board wins. Specify a winning strategy for the second player.

There are two stacks of coins on a table: in one of them there are 30 coins, and in the other – 20. You can take any number of coins from one stack per move. The player who cannot make a move is the one that loses. Which player wins with the correct strategy?

Given a board (divided into squares) of the size: a) \(10\times 12\), b) \(9\times 10\), c) \(9\times 11\), consider the game with two players where: in one turn a player is allowed to cross out any row or any column if there is at least one square not crossed out. The loser is the one who cannot make a move. Is there a winning strategy for one of the players?

Three people are talking at dinner: Greyson, Blackburne and Reddick. The black-haired person told Greyson: “It is curious that one of us is grey-haired, the other is black-haired, and the third is red-haired, but no one has hair colour that matches their surname.” What colour hair does each of the men chatting have?