A King, 1000 Bottles of Wine, 10 Prisoners and a Drop of Poison

a mathematical riddle

Ready for the solution?

Here’s the riddle we were looking at in the last lesson in case you missed it.

The King of a small country invites 1000 senators to his annual party. As a tradition, each senator brings the King a bottle of wine. Soon after, the Queen discovers that one of the senators is trying to assassinate the King by giving him a bottle of poisoned wine. Unfortunately, they do not know which senator, nor which bottle of wine is poisoned, and the poison is completely indiscernible. However, the King has 10 prisoners he plans to execute. He decides to use them as taste testers to determine which bottle of wine contains the poison. The poison when taken has no effect on the prisoner until exactly 24 hours later when the infected prisoner suddenly dies. The King needs to determine which bottle of wine is poisoned by tomorrow so that the festivities can continue as planned. Hence he only has time for one round of testing. How can the King administer the wine to the prisoners to ensure that 24 hours from now he is guaranteed to have found the poisoned wine bottle?

Don’t worry if you weren’t able to solve it. The important part is to try.

If you’re still working on this, you might find this article helpful!