April 2018
 

[url]https://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/haifa/ponderthis/challenges/April2018.html[/url]

Another skip... extremely easy, search space is around 16k only...
:disappointed:

Quoting myself again...
(Serge reminded me of this, when he posted the May thread today).

On April 2nd, just after posting the thing above (it was 6 PM here when I posted), I solved this problem in my head on the way home (about 40 minutes driving from my work place, but, hmm, ahem... I didn't spent all of the way, for sure, thinking to this puzzle). As said, the problem is trivial and this can be seen from the how many people answered in the first days.

But the funny part is that next day I pointed a colleague to it, and the guy, electronic engineer, "solved" it in few seconds in the following way: "Pick the brown balloon". Then seeing the look on my face, added "Aren't the balloons [URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_color_code"]color coded[/URL]?".

*(he also added something like "What a shitty design is that!" and we had a lot of fun after, but I intentionally omitted this part, because the joke looks better without it. For who didn't get the joke, in electronic design, if you have for example a lot of wires, like in some connection cable, whatever, then the wires are color-coded, each color represents a number, and wire number X "must" be connected to pin number X, this will save lots of time when you debug some interface, cable, connection, etc., as you don't need to measure which wire goes where - otherwise, if standards are not followed, like in some "made in China" cheap cables, a lot of time is wasted to measure each wire to see where it is going, etc., so that is called a "shitty" design).

I was for a while tempted to send that "solution" to IBM, they should give me a gold star for it, haha :razz:

[url]https://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/haifa/ponderthis/solutions/April2018.html[/url]