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Monday Riddle #31

I know it's Tuesday, but it feels like a Monday.  Sorry for the delay...  Here's this week's Monday Riddle:

Riddle #72: [via]
An evil king has 1000 bottles of wine. A neighboring queen plots to kill the bad king, and sends a servant to poison the wine. The king's guards catch the servant after he has only poisoned one bottle. The guards don't know which bottle was poisoned, but they do know that the poison is so potent that even if it was diluted 1,000,000 times, it would still be fatal. Furthermore, the effects of the poison take one month to surface. The king decides he will get some of his prisoners in his vast dungeons to drink the wine. Rather than using 1000 prisoners each assigned to a particular bottle, this king knows that he needs to murder no more than 10 prisoners to figure out what bottle is poisoned, and will still be able to drink the rest of the wine in 5 weeks time. How does he pull this off?

Don't forget to share your ideas in the comments.  Read more for the solution to last week's Monday Riddle.

Update: I don't have an "official" solution to Riddle #72. See Jason's comment--he's pretty smart so he just might be right :) If you think you might have a better answer post it in the comments.


Here is the solution to last week's Monday Riddle:

Riddle #71:
We will call the people A, B & C in the order that they speak.

A does not know what colour hat he is wearing. A would only know what colour hat he was wearing if he could see that B & C were both wearing red hats, (as there were only two red hats in the cupboard.) This is not the case so either:-

B & C are both wearing blue hats
OR
one of B & C is wearing red and the other is wearing blue

When B speaks we obviously assume he has thought of all of this. When B looks at C if C were wearing red then he would know that he must be wearing blue as they can't both be wearing red. But this does not happen so C must be wearing blue, meaning that B doesn't know if he is wearing red or blue:

The third person must be wearing a BLUE hat.



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