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A friend of mine posed the following puzzle:
You have 12 marbles, which all have the same weight except one, which may be either heavier or lighter. How can you find the different one in three weighings on a balance scale?
I know I’ve seen it before, but it still too me a while to work out a solution. Then I wanted to visualize the solution, and cobbled together haskell, graphviz, and a couple shell scripts.
Then, of course, I saw my solution was wrong and had to re-work it.
Spoiler, of course:
https://github.com/bwbeach/puzzles/blob/main/weigh-twelve/README.md
@bwbeach I had to think a bit about the puzzle, but I finally figured out a solution on my own, whew. This kind of puzzle always trips you up into the ‘obvious’ solution first until you realize that it cannot be right.