Knowing I'm on the right track and still not being able to solve it frustrates me even more! What the heck is a significant number anyways, it's been so long since I learned that stuff!

 

Here's my solution:

If the bottles were arranged in a line, then:

1) the first person would drink from every other bottle of wine, skipping the first (2nd bottle, 4th bottle, 8th bottle, etc...)
2) the second person would skip 2 bottles then drink from 2 bottles (3rd and 4th, then 7th and 8th, etc...)
3) the third person would skip 4 bottles then drink from the next 4 bottles (5th-8th, 13th-16th, etc...)
4) the 4th person would skip 8 bottles and then drink from the next 8
5) and so on and so forth...

Then you could use binary to figure out which bottle is poisoned depending on the combination of people who died.


Here's a small scale example with 8 bottles and 3 servants
[CODE]

 

I guess I'll post my answer now, since it's near the end of the day...
1000 bottles, numbered say 1 to 1000.
(and this is way most likely to get everyone killed, 'cos it illustrates the method better)
...


















...
person 1 sips the first 512 bottles (i.e., 1 - 512)
person 2 sips alternating groups of 256 bottles, starting at 1 (i.e., 1 - 256, 513 - 768)
person 3 sips alternating groups of 128 bottles, starting at 1 (i.e., 1 - 128, 257 - 384, 513 - 640 ...)
person 4 sips alternating groups of 64 bottles, starting at 1 (i.e., 1 - 64, 129 - 192 ...)
person 5 sips alternating groups of 32 bottles, starting at 1
person 6 sips alternating groups of 16 bottles, starting at 1
person 7 sips alternating groups of 8 bottles, starting at 1
person 8 sips alternating groups of 4 bottles, starting at 1
person 9 sips alternating groups of 2 bottles, starting at 1 (i.e., 1-2, 5-6, 9-10...)
person 10 sips from odd numbered bottles (i.e., 1, 3, 5, 7, 9)

so if everyone dies, you know it's the first bottle that's poisoned.
everyone but person 10 dies, and it's the second bottle that's poisoned.
everyone but person 9 dies and it's the third bottle.
everyone but persons 9 and 10 dies and it's the fourth bottle...
if it's the last bottle, persons 6, 8, 9 and 10 dies.

you'll see that someone always gets killed in this example.
a more humane way which involves less people dying (potentially) is to "shift" the numbers a bit. so that the first person sips the second 512 instead of the first (thus in effect only drinking 488 bottles), second person sips alternating groups of 256 starting from *the second 256*... this way if no one dies, it's the first bottle etc...

 

Edit

Edasaurus and Jack got it.

Jack's is basically backwards of Edsaurus's

 

yeap, you get more people killed that way

 

You are correct they both got. The easiest way to do this is to think in 'binary' Here's a good explanation:

number the bottles 1 to 1000, and write the number in binary format.

bottle 1 = 0000000001
bottle 250 = 0011111010
bottle 1000 = 1111101000

now take your prisoner's 1 through 10 and let prisoner 1 take a sip from every bottle that has a 1 in its least significant bit. let prisoner 10 take a sip from every bottle with a 1 in its most significant bit. etc.

prisoner 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
bottle 924 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0

for instance, bottle #924 would be sipped by 10,9,8,5,4 and 3. that way if bottle #924 was the poisoned one, only those prisoners would die.

after four weeks, line the prisoners up in their bit order and read each living prisoner as a 0 bit and each dead prisoner as a 1 bit. the number that you get is the bottle of wine that was poisoned.

 

I'll post another riddle tomorrow, do you want one that's harder or easier than today's??

 

I'd rather just have the wine!

 

ewww