The two people used to be lovers, and they hadn’t connected in a while. The second person hits the button for their floor and says “hello” upon recognizing the first person. They look into each other’s eyes and tacitly decide to rekindle their romance, so they both get off on the first person’s floor.
The second person was sent to assassinate the first person and after the killing dragged the now lifeless corpse into the second person’s desired floor.
I don’t care what the desired answer is. This one fits the scenario and is the one I’m declaring is right.
The first person was too busy pushing buttons on their phone to bother pushing any elevator buttons. By coincidence, they wanted to get off on the same floor.
One of them pushed the button for the roof, but on the way up their phone pinged with an alert that it had just started to hail, so they got off on the other person’s floor instead, either because they lived there or to find a down elevator.
Person 2 has been stalking person 1, had pushed a different floor in order to deceive them so they wouldn’t run back off the elevator, and followed them off when they got off; possibly while holding a knife to them.
While in the elevator, they had a conversation that led them both to choose the same floor, either because they wanted to continue the conversation or because one said something that caused the other to decide they’d picked the wrong floor the first time.
The first person saw the second person’s mouth move but didn’t hear them, which caused them to realize that they’d suddenly gone deaf, and they got off at the second person’s floor because that floor had an ear doctor on it.
Same as the one just above, except they only realized their hearing aid batteries had died, so they got off on the floor where they thought they could buy some.
First person had gone to see the second person, found them not home, walked back down a flight or three, decided to go up to the roof gardens instead and got back on the elevator, pushing the roof button. When the second person got on and said hello to them, they realized they could visit person 2 after all, so they got off on #2’s floor instead of going to the roof.
I could do this all week, probably –
First person pressed button for the floor, second person gets in the elevator, sees the correct floor already lit up and then presses “close door.”
I believe he was also known by some as Bob “buy a vowel” Ctvrtlik.
I never said the second person pressed an elevator button-The “hello” was the clue.
Are we going to have to ask lateral thinking-type questions?
Are we not talking about a cell phone?
I came across this one recently:
Mary has twelve identical shoe boxes labeled A through L. She secretly and randomly places pairs of her exotic silver shoes in two of the boxes, and pairs of her traditional black shoes in the others. The boxes are closed and stacked.
The shoe boxes are stacked 4x3, as shown:
A B C D
E F G H
I J K L
Jack arrives and as always he begins opening shoeboxes going left to right, top to bottom. First opening A, then B, then…-C-D-E -F…and so on. If Jack finds a silver pair he stops and counts the number of boxes he had previouly opened without finding such a shoe. That is his score. Now Raymond enters and is given the same shoebox set loaded exactly as before, but Raymond always opens them in a different peculiar pattern. Raymond opens A, then E, then I then B then F then J, C then G, then K and so on. Raymond also has to stop when he finds a silver shoe and note his score. Lower score wins.
If Jack and Raymond play their shoe game many many times, with Mary randomly changing the location of the silver pairs each round but the game is otherwise played the same who has the advantage? Jack (the horizontal tactic) or Raymond (the vertical tactic)?
I don’t have a lot of time to think about this right now, but here is my initial solution and workings - if wrong, I’d be grateful for a hint towards the flaw in my reasoning!
I calculate that Jack has a slight advantage. I reasoned that in the case the first box containing silver shoes is A, both score 0 and tie. If the first box containing silver shoes is B, then Jack wins in the 9 cases of the second box being anything but E (otherwise they tie). Conversely, if the second box is E, Raymond wins in the 9 cases of the second box being anything but B. Discounting the silver shoes being in any of A, B, E, this symmetry then holds for boxes C and I also. Then if we discount all those and look at D we find Jack wins in 6 cases, but for F Raymond only wins in 5 cases. However this is cancelled out by J (for which Raymond wins 4 cases) and G (Jack wins 3 cases). There remains only H (2 wins for Jack) and K (1 win for Raymond). Follows the conclusion as stated.
Oh, I’ve been meaning to ask: how do you like your Honda Fit?
Yes. It seems counterintuitive, but you are right.
Thanks. Interestingly, I didn’t see it as counter-intuitive:
Firstly, the slight asymmetry of the setup suggested to me there could be an advantage one way or the other, and given that, it seemed to me the ‘horizontal’ strategy might give an extra ‘opportunity’ of finding the silver shoes each pass, because of the rows being longer than the columns. In fact, I expected to find the opposite when I tested it, because my intuition is generally poor for probability puzzles!
I’m way too lazy to create a 479001600 by 479001600 testing every possible ordering against every other possible ordering - is there an ordering that is better than any other (seems unlikely)?
Biotop,
Do you follow the Futility Closet blog?
Yes. It is where I got the shoebox puzzle.
I will close this in the poll thread (probably the wrong place for it anyway) and will try it here.
Riddle: Which one does not belong:
- Soup and sandwich
- Dancing in the dark
- Rock your world
- Highly motivated
- Essential quality
- Helium
- Sainthood
0 voters
How do you plant 10 trees so that you have five rows with four trees in each row?
Draw a five pointed star. The five points and the five points of the internal pentagon show how to arrange them.
AA + BB + CC = ABC
What digits are A, B, and C?
1, 9, and 8
11 + 99 + 88 = 198
AA + BB must add up to 110 because you need the zero for the last digit to equal C. And three two-digit numbers added up will be less than 300, meaning that A can only be 1 or 2, and B only 8 or 9. After that I stopped trying to logic it and just plugged in numbers for C that looked like they’d work.