The other day Dallin told us a riddle that no one was able to figure out. The riddle he related goes as such, “you’re in a room with X amount of gold bags and a scale that will give you one reading one time. Each of the bags has real gold except for one bag which weighs slightly different than the rest. How do you figure out which bag is the faulty gold bag?”
We were all stuck on it the rest of the day. It seemed impossible. My solution to weigh one bag, add another and another and another until you get a different reading didn’t work as it did not follow the guideline of only being able to receive ONE reading from the scale.
I finally gave up this morning (4 days later) and Googled the riddle. I ran into a web post that contained the riddle and the answer. However, to my frustration, the riddle here actually read like this, “You have 10 bags of gold coins, 10 coins per bag, 10 grams per coin, but one bag of coins weigh only 9 grams per coin (because of low quality). How do you find out which bag contains low quality gold coins? You may use a scale only one time.”
So there WAS more information!!!! Dallin was holding out on us (probably not on purpose. His version was most likely the way it was related to him and he still figured it out, but you would expect that from Dallin. The guy’s a genius.)!
It made me think of some clients who ask you to help their business succeed online without providing you with what success in their market actually means. Of course, a ranch land investor is going to have a different conversion rate than an online clothing store. To some point, it is the marketer’s responsibility to research and determine the market benchmarks and trends, but the business owner also needs to take the responsibility of ensuring the marketer knows exactly what he views a successful campaign to be.
So let’s make sure we get the story straight. If we want someone to figure out a problem, we need to provide the tools and means they need to succeed at debunking that particular dilemma.
By the way, here is the solution to the riddle 🙂 Try to figure it out first though!
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