Can You Solve the Mystery Box Riddle?
Here at PopMech, we love mind-bending math and logic puzzles, which is why we regularly recruit the sharpest minds in the world to concoct riddles that will test your critical thinking, mathematics, and logic skills. The following riddle is one particularly punishing problem—so go grab a pencil and a piece of scratch paper and prepare to rip your hair out (in the best way). No cheating!
➡ The Problem
Three sisters combine their money to buy a mystery box full of an unknown amount of comic books. The box arrives at the sisters’ house one night, and they agree to store it in their younger brother’s room and not open it until the next morning.
But that night, one sister can’t sleep, so she decides to sneak in and open the box. Looking inside, she finds that she can split the comic books into three equal shares, plus one extra comic. She sees her brother awake and spying, so she hands him the extra comic, takes her own share of one-third of the remaining comic books, and goes back to sleep.
An hour later, the second sister does the exact same thing. She opens the box and sees that the comics can be split into three equal shares, plus one extra comic. She bribes the spying little brother with a comic, takes one-third of the remaining books, and goes back to sleep.
Then, an hour after that, the third sister does the same thing yet again, bribing the spying little brother with a comic, taking one-third of the remaining books, and returning to bed.
In the morning, none of the sisters want to reveal that they’ve already taken any comics. So they each pretend to be surprised when they look in the box. They dump out the comics and realize that the number of books can easily be split into three equal shares along with one extra comic, which they gave to their happy little brother.
What’s the smallest possible number of comic books that could have been in that mystery box when it first arrived? And how many comics does each sibling have?
➡ The Hint
Take careful notes! It’s easy to lose your place in the pattern.
➡ The Solution
Ready for the solution? Click here to see if you’re right —and to get an insanely in-depth breakdown of how to solve this problem, plus the complete answers to 100+ other challenging riddles.
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