Two Egg Problem

I encountered this interview question once: Two Egg Problem, which states:

You are given two eggs, and access to a 100-story building. Both eggs are identical. The aim is to find out the highest floor from which an egg will not break when dropped out of a window from that floor. If an egg is dropped and does not break, it is undamaged and can be dropped again. However, once an egg is broken, that’s it for that egg.

If an egg breaks when dropped from floor n, then it would also have broken from any floor above that. If an egg survives a fall, then it will survive any fall shorter than that.

The question is: What strategy should you adopt to minimize the number egg drops it takes to find the solution?. (And what is the worst case for the number of drops it will take?)

Recommend a blog: The Functional Art

This blog: The Functional Art is very much worth recommending – chances are you’ve already heard of it – a blog of such quality is hard to miss. For example, this article led me into the door of understanding the rival between two legendary data scientists: Richard Saul Wurman, and Edward R. Tufte. Great reading!

I’ve got the book with the same title for a while, though I haven’t got a chance to start reading it.