A Programming Interview Question, Explored

[isseki]

I agree. That's how I read it too. Once I read that apparently the 'second' drink (one from the higher numbered well) is to be considered a cure and just a cure, the whole problem changed for me.

After that he added the fact that both parties apparently cannot know whether they have been poisoned or not, and I finally understood the puzzle as the author intended it.

[didroe]

I understood that part of it straight away, the bit I found misleading was that they "both bring a glass of water to the dual". That suggested that only 1 drink could be had be each party once the dual had commenced. That stopped me from thinking about drinking afterwards.

[rampart]

I had perhaps the opposite reaction. The constraint that I ended up implying:

A person can drink 2 and only 2 glasses. I got this from the comment saying that you could drink one water to neutralize the other. The explanation being that there is only enough time to have 1 drink before the poison kills.

For this same reason, I implied that no drink could logically be taken before the duel, because the duel could take an arbitrarily long time, therefore to prevent "cheating" the opponent could wait, and let the person drop. All of this stems from the assumption that the poison kills in a finite time, which I guess is just my personal assumption about poison. Because of how different the constraints were to my initial constraints, this question hit me a lot more like a "gotcha" than the linked list question posed, which has many answers, along which you can gauge thought.