-
As your country's top spy,
-
you must infiltrate the headquarters
of the evil syndicate,
-
find the secret control panel,
-
and deactivate their death ray.
-
But all you have to go on
is the following information
-
picked up by your surveillance team.
-
The headquarters is a massive pyramid
with a single room at the top level,
-
two rooms on the next,
-
and so on.
-
The control panel is hidden
behind a painting
-
on the highest floor that can satisfy
the following conditions:
-
Each room has exactly three doors
to other rooms on that floor,
-
except the control panel room,
-
which connects to only one,
-
there are no hallways,
-
and you can ignore stairs.
-
Unfortunately,
you don't have a floor plan,
-
and you'll only have enough time
to search a single floor
-
before the alarm system reactivates.
-
Can you figure out which floor
the control room is on?
-
Pause now to solve the riddle yourself.
-
Answer in: 3
-
Answer in: 2
-
Answer in: 1
-
To solve this problem,
we need to visualize it.
-
For starters, we know
that on the correct floor
-
there's one room,
-
let's call it room A,
-
with one door to the control panel room,
-
plus one door to room B,
-
and one to C.
-
So there must be at least four rooms,
-
which we can represent as circles,
-
drawing lines between them
for the doorways.
-
But once we connect rooms B and C,
-
there are no other connections possible,
-
so the fourth floor down
from the top is out.
-
We know the control panel has to be
as high up as possible,
-
so let's make our way down the pyramid.
-
The fifth highest floor
doesn't work either.
-
We can figure that out by drawing it,
-
but to be sure we haven't missed
any possibilities,
-
here's another way.
-
Every door corresponds to a line
in our graph
-
that makes two rooms into neighbors.
-
So in the end, there have to be
an even number of neighbors
-
no matter how many connections we make.
-
On the fifth highest floor,
to fulfill our starting conditions,
-
we'd need four rooms
with three neighbors each,
-
plus the control panel room
with one neighbor,
-
which makes 13 total neighbors.
-
Since that's an odd number,
it's not possible,
-
and in fact, this also rules out every
floor that has an odd number of rooms.
-
So let's go one more floor down.
-
When we draw out the rooms,
-
low and behold, we can find an arrangement
that works like this.
-
Incidentally, the study
of such visual models
-
that show the connections and
relationships between different objects
-
is known as graph theory.
-
In a basic graph, the circles representing
the objects are known as nodes,
-
while the connecting lines
are called edges.
-
Researchers studying such graphs
ask questions like,
-
"How far is this node from that one?"
-
"How many edges does
the most popular node have?"
-
"Is there a route between these two nodes,
and if so, how long is it?"
-
Graphs like this are often used
to map communication networks,
-
but they can represent almost
any kind of network,
-
from transport connections within a city
-
and social relationships among people,
-
to chemical interactions between proteins
-
or the spread of an epidemic
through different locations.
-
So, armed with these techniques,
back to the pyramid.
-
You avoid the guards and security cameras,
-
infiltrate the sixth floor from the top,
-
find the hidden panel,
-
pull some conspicuous levers,
-
and send the death ray crashing
into the ocean.
-
Now, time to solve the mystery
-
of why your surveillance team
always gives you cryptic information.
-
Hi everybody.
-
If you liked this riddle,
try solving these two.