The 25-Horse Challenge — Can You Find the Fastest Three?
Math Puzzle
Imagine you are in charge of organizing a tournament-style horse race. You have a total of 25 horses. However, you can only race 5 horses at a time and you don’t have a stopwatch. The only information you get from each race is the order of finish.
Can you find the three fastest horses using the least number of races?
Before looking into the solution, spend some time to solve it by yourself.
We will solve this puzzle by eliminating unnecessary races step by step.
- We divide the 25 horses into 5 groups, each group having 5 horses and race them.
- Each race ranks the horses from 1st to 5th position with their group.
- Since only the top three horses matter, then we can immediately eliminate the bottom two from each race.
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