Hedge Fund Brainteasers: The Tournament Brainteaser | No BS Job Search Advice Radio

Guess what? I got another brainteaser for you! Here's the problem. Ready?

You got 5623 participants in a tournament. How many games would be needed in order to determine a winner?

Actually, there are 2 ways to answer this. I will start with the classic and then go to the other one.

In the classic, what you're doing is dividing this number in half each time. In the 1st round, there are 2811 games; one person has a b. The next round is 1406 games. In , the onethis round, the person who has the bye in the previous round is included.

Then, the next round has 703 games, the next round has 351 games. Any remainder has a bye and is included in the next round. So that's one way to answer it. Here's the fun one.

The idea is not to exclude this answer, but to included as part of your answer.

You can also say, "if all 5623 people competed one round you can have a winner from that one round." Got that? In this case were not talking about pairings were talking about a way that will 5623 people are competing with one another." and thus theoretically one person could be the winner.

Think of it like a lottery with 5623 people and there is only one winner. We don't know what the game is;, we just know that there could be a game where there could be one winner.