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Optical Illusions

If you count carefully the number of people before the tiles scramble and after that, you will see that one person disappears. Can you explain how this is possible?

Similarly, in this picture it looks like after changing the places of the tiles in the diagram, their total area decreases by one. Can you explain this?

If you look carefully, you will notice that every person in the picture of 12 people is slightly taller than the corresponding person in the picture of 13 people. Basically, we can cut little pieces from 12 different people without making noticeable changes and arrange them into a new person.

For the second question, none of the shapes before and after the scrambling is really a triangle. One of them is a bit curved in at the hypotenuse and the other one is a bit curved out. This is barely noticeable, because the red and the blue triangle have very similar proportions of their sides – 5/2 ~ 7/3.

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3 Men, 1 Woman

Warning: this puzzle involves mature themes that are inappropriate for younger audiences. If you are not an adult, please skip this puzzle.

3 men must have sex with 1 woman, but they have only 2 condoms. Each of the 4 people has some unique STD which they don’t want to transfer to the rest. What can they do?

They can start by putting the two condoms on top of each other and letting the first man use them. After that, the second man can take the inner condom out and use just the outer condom. Finally, the third man can take the removed inner condom, turn it inside out, and place it back inside the outer condom. Then he, he can use the two condoms simultaneously.

Water with Ice

You have a glass of water and an ice cube floating in it. When the ice cube melts, will the water level increase, decrease or remain the same?

It will remain the same. The amount of water that the ice cube displaces is equal to its mass. Since the mass does not change and the density of water is equal to 1, the extra water after melting will be the same amount as the displaced water before that.

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Heads Up, Heads Down

You are blindfolded and on the table, in front of you, 50 coins are placed. You are told that X of them are heads up and the rest are heads down. Then you are asked to separate the coins into two groups and optionally flip some of them so that the number of heads in both groups becomes the same. How can you do this?

Separate the coins into one group of X coins and into another group of 50-X coins, then flip every coin in the first group. If in the first group there were Y heads up initially, then after flipping there would be X-Y – exactly the number of heads up in the second group.

Mixed Up Pills

One patient has two bottles with 30 pills each and every night has to take one pill from each of the bottles. Unfortunately one night after he takes out a pill from the first bottle and places it on the table, by accident drops two pills from the second bottle right next to it. The pills look identical, so he can not differentiate them. It is very important that he continues his treatment diligently throughout the entire timespan of 30 days. What should the patient do?

The patient should keep taking one pill from each bottle until there are 4 pills remaining – 1 in the first bottle and 3 on the table. On the 29th day he splits the pills in halves and takes one half from each pill. On the 30th day he takes the remaining halves of the pills.

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Gun Duel

Mick, Nick, and Rick arrange a three-person gun duel. Mick hits his target 1 out of every 3 times, Nick hits his target 2 out of every 3 times, and Rick hits his target every time. If the three are taking turns shooting at each other, with Mick starting first and Nick second, what should be Mick’s strategy?

Clearly, Mick should not aim for Nick, because if he kills him, then he will be killed by Rick. Similarly, Nick should not aim for Mick, because if he kills him, then he also will be killed by Rick. Therefore, if Rick ends up against alive Mick and Nick, he will aim at Nick, because he would prefer to face off a weaker opponent afterward. This means that if Nick is alive after Mick shoots, he will shoot at Rick.

Thus, if Mick shoots at Rick and kills him, then he will have to face off Nick with chance of survival less than 1/3. Instead, if he decides to shoot in the air, then he will face off Nick or Rick with chance of survival at least 1/3. Therefore, Mick’s strategy is to keep shooting in the air, until he ends up alone against one of his opponents.