Riddles

What if he doesn't die? Then you don't know which bottle is the right one.

The riddle is not about chances, its about coming up with a for-sure system of finding one bottle out of a thousand.

Nope, its possible with less. I'll give you a hint: Convert 1000 from decimal to binary.

I thought hints were supposed to help you, not tell you what you've already done.

10

If you assign each bottle with a binary number between 1 and 999 _{(0000000001 and 1111100111)}, and assign 10 prisoners to a letter, you can make a sort of grid.
Each prisoner drinks from every bottle that has a 1 in their column.
When the prisoners die, you make a number with 1's for the prisoners that died, and 0's for the rest. That is your bottle.

Oh, and if none of them die, its the bottle that you didn't test.

I had the idea of dividing them into groups and testing twice, but there is not enough time to do that.

Oh wait, damn it. I forgot the second part to the riddle.

Can you find the right bottle in 24 hours, without more than 8 prisoners dying?
Sorry.

Lemme guess: Test a certain number of prisoners, but assign them trinary numbers instead, so only one in three dies? Or something like that.

Throw all the bottles out and buy more 

Eh, screw that riddle. It knocked the thread unconcious. New, easier riddle:

Could you tell us the answer to the last one?

We are tiny, well-known creatures,
All with special sounds and features:
The first of us in glass is met,
And the next is found in jet;
A third that can be find in tin,
And the fourth a box within;
If the last you should pursue,
We have already given a clue.

Could you tell us the answer to the last one?

Seconded.

Quote from: Razzorman on March 13, 2010, 17:31:15

Could you tell us the answer to the last one?

Seconded.

Although the last post was MORE THEN A YEAR AGO, I think this riddle is still up. My strategy would be to put the wine in 100x100 square, and have 1 prisoner test each row, and each coloumn. If say, the prisoner testing row 34 dies, and the prisoner testing row 50 dies, you know that it's the wine is row 34 and coloumn 50. 2 prisoners will die.