How can you drop two eggs the fewest amount of times, without them breaking?
Answers
Answer:
A rather long-winded question, asked by a Silicon Valley engineering company. Here’s the full question:
Suppose that there is a building with 100 floors. You are given two identical eggs. The most interesting property of the eggs is that every egg has its own “threshold” floor. Let’s call that floor N. What this means is that the egg will not break when dropped from any floor below floor N, but the egg will definitely break from any floor above floor N, including floor N itself.
Explanation:
For example, if the property of the eggs is that N equals 15, those eggs will always break on any floor higher than or equal to the 15th floor, but those eggs will never break on any floor below floor 15. The same holds true for the other egg, since they are identical.
Here is the question: What strategy should be taken in order to minimize the number of egg drops used to find floor N (the threshold floor) for the egg? Also, what is the minimum number of drops for the worst case using this strategy?