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------------------------------------------------ You have 1000 wine bottles, one of which is poisoned. You want to determine which bottle is poisoned by feeding the wine to the rats. The poisoned wine takes one hour to work.

How many rats are necessary to find the poisoned bottle in one hour?

To determine which one of the 1000 wine bottles is poisoned using rats within one hour, we need to utilize a binary approach. We can label each bottle with a unique binary number from 0000000001 to 1111101000 (which is the binary representation for numbers 1 through 1000). Then, we assign each digit place a rat, which means we will have a total of 10 rats since the largest number requires 10 binary digits to be represented.

We give each rat wine from the bottles corresponding to a '1' in their assigned digit place across all bottles. If a bottle has a binary label of 1011011100, for example, only the rats assigned to these specific positions where there's a '1' in the label would get a sample of this wine. After one hour, we will observe which rats have succumbed to the poison. By noting the specific combination of rats that were affected, we can reconstruct the binary number, which will correspond to the poisoned bottle.

Thus, the required number of rats is 10, which corresponds to the number of binary digit places needed to uniquely identify each bottle.