Two Poisoned Bottles in One Round
A cellar has 8 bottles of wine, exactly two of which are poisoned. Before a single round of tasting, you assign each taster a set of bottles to drink from. A taster dies if any of the bottles they drink from is poisoned and survives otherwise. After the round you see exactly which tasters died, and from that you must be able to name the two poisoned bottles. What is the minimum number of tasters needed?
Related problems & prerequisites
Worth solving first
- Three Switches, One Bulb 5.0/10
Source: Group-testing puzzle (pair-detecting, i.e. 2-separable binary codes); the setting is classical in combinatorial group testing, but this version is an original design for AxiomIQ.