If Juan gets a chance to shoot, he will shoot Jose (because Jose has a higher chance of killing him) and he will kill Jose because he has 100% accuracy. Jose knows this, and he gets a chance to shoot first, so he will shoot at Juan. There is a 70% chance that he will manage to kill Juan if he ge...

We are slated to go into public beta in about 19 hours as I write. Are we ready for it? I am concerned that the site is full of chestnuts — solutions to classic puzzles that are already all over the web. This makes a significant part of the site rather boring, which doesn't bode well for the sit...

Riddle me this: $$ \begin{array}{l|l|l} \text{Site} & \text{Puzzling} & \TeX - \LaTeX \\ \hline \text{MathJax} & \text{True} & \text{False} \\ \end{array} $$

OK, so chat is now available... but; it has been suggested that for Mathematics we should have TeX support. The current TeX processing has some non-trivial client impact. Before I even attempt trying to hack this in, is this something that the community would want / use? (this would only apply ...

A group of N pirates has come by a chest containing 200 gold coins. Their rules require that the coins be distributed by the following approach. The pirates are ranked from fiercest to meekest and all pirates know the ranking. The fiercest must propose a division, which is put to majority vote...

With three children, three red hats and two black hats, there are 7 different configurations possible: $\begin{array}{cccl} \text{Alice} & \text{Bob} & \text{Carol} \\ \\ \hline \text{red} & \text{red} & \fbox{red} & \text{(1)} \\ \text{black} & \text{red} & \fbox{red} & \text{(2)} \\ ...

The snail climbs at a net pace of a foot per 24 hours, so the naive answer would be 30 days. However, after 27 days, it finds itself at 3 feet from the top. After having crawled the remaining 3 feet on the next day, it's already out of the well and no longer slips down! The general formula is \...

In single-solution regular Sudoku puzzles, sometimes you may encounter a combination of possible cell solutions such as: {2,7} in A1 and A7 (same row) {2,7} in A7 and B8 (same box) {2,7} in B8 and E8 (same column) {2,3,5,7} in E1 (same column as A1 and same row as E8) I call patterns like the...

This Area 51 discussion suggests that posting brainteasers as questions should be allowed. I think these could be one of the most, accessible, interesting possible posts to keep the community engaged. (We're here because we like puzzles, right?) Eventually, we'll probably need to think as a gro...

Everyone, we really need to hunker down and come up with consistent guidelines for the content of this site. This post will be a container question for the substantial, site defining questions, and will eventually become a faq. Please do not answer this question; please go to the linked questions...

I feel like there's a problem with Stack Overflow, as the number of people prowling it increases. Each question's answers are sorted by descending score and then by descending time of posting. This means that if a person sits down and answers a question in a long, thorough way, going through eve...

I decided to look at all questions with exactly two non-negatively scored answers. The first answer is declared the fastest gun and the second answer's score is subtracted from the score of the first. Assuming there's no other systematic reason the first answer should be qualitatively better1, ...