Overview
The poisoned-wine puzzle is a vivid lesson in binary encoding: a handful of testers can identify one bad bottle among exponentially many.
How to solve The Poisoned Wine
- Number the bottles in binary and assign each taster to one bit.
- A taster drinks from every bottle whose bit is 1 in their position.
- The set of tasters who fall ill spells the poisoned bottle's number in binary.
The key insight
Each taster answers one yes/no question — one bit. With b independent bits you can name any of 2^b bottles, so testers scale logarithmically.
Variations & echoes
- The famous version has 1000 bottles solved by just 10 tasters (2¹⁰ = 1024).
- The same encoding underlies Hamming codes and RAID parity.
Frequently asked questions
What if two bottles were poisoned?
Simple binary labelling no longer suffices; you'd need more testers and a more elaborate code.