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You are in a mansion, stuck in there armed with only a baseball bat that can only take 100 more hits. Then you are at the mercy of the War Ghosts, ghosts that can take as many hits according to color. Due to evolution and natural selection, 99 of them turned camo, able to take 5 hits per ghost. One is pale, which can be killed with one hit. The pattern and hits are shown respectively:

Camo -> Blue -> Red -> Yellow -> Pale

The above means that a Camo ghost will turn blue after one hit, red with another, yellow with another, pale with another, and dead with another.

With only your baseball bat, how can you kill them all with only 100 shots at them?

NOTE: Hits cannot go through ghosts so swinging a hundred times through them will not work. Also, one ghost per hit. The laws of physics has been bent and ricochets and recoil does not exist. The ghosts can live forever.

EDIT: You will die of old age, "war" is a fancy adjective that will not affect the ghosts' lives, and the questions is: How can you kill all 100 ghosts with only you baseball bat as the only weapon where physics disregards force, recoil, and rebound?

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    $\begingroup$ Superficially at least, this seems like it should be tagged "lateral-thinking" or something else, rather than "logic-puzzle" (unless I'm missing something)... $\endgroup$
    – Alconja
    Feb 9, 2016 at 1:05
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    $\begingroup$ Or -- ghosts are already dead, so plow your bat into toothpicks, the war is over! (Ala the riddle of burying the survivors of a plane crash) $\endgroup$
    – Jeff Schaller
    Feb 9, 2016 at 1:41
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    $\begingroup$ Are you the kind of person who likes to phrase questions in base 46? $\endgroup$
    – hexomino
    Feb 9, 2016 at 14:02
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    $\begingroup$ To be completely honest this seems like more "guess what I'm thinking" than "puzzle". If the answer makes sense looking back then I may change my mind but it doesn't seem likely that it will. $\endgroup$
    – Deusovi ♦
    Feb 10, 2016 at 21:37
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    $\begingroup$ And they also inherited the reaction of going pale, despite presumably not having any blood? $\endgroup$
    – f''
    Feb 12, 2016 at 2:01

7 Answers 7

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Here's my guess

Hit the pale ghost as hard as you can for a spectacular death. The other ghosts will pale at seeing this, allowing you to kill them with one hit each.

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  • $\begingroup$ Well done! You finally answered the question! $\endgroup$
    – Anthony Pham
    Feb 12, 2016 at 1:07
  • $\begingroup$ Great thinking! $\endgroup$
    – k--
    Feb 12, 2016 at 8:51
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The camo ghosts are camouflage, i.e. they will appear as whatever colour is behind them. Therefore, you would lure the pale ghost and a camouflage ghost together and hit the camo ghost when the pale ghost is behind it. You repeat this 98 more times with the other camo ghosts, and then finally hit the real pale ghost for 100 hits.

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    $\begingroup$ Welcome to Puzzling! This is an interesting idea but I'd be really disappointed if this were the answer TBH - camouflage is a specific pattern, not transparency. $\endgroup$
    – Deusovi ♦
    Feb 9, 2016 at 3:50
  • $\begingroup$ @Deusovi I agree and I wonder if they do mean camouflage as a pattern. I was thinking of it as that until I started thinking of camouflage like a chameleon, then I thought maybe that was the trick $\endgroup$
    – k--
    Feb 9, 2016 at 9:20
  • $\begingroup$ Camo is a pattern $\endgroup$
    – Anthony Pham
    Feb 9, 2016 at 18:50
  • $\begingroup$ I will tomorrow $\endgroup$
    – Anthony Pham
    Feb 10, 2016 at 21:25
  • $\begingroup$ @k-- in case you are interested, I solved it $\endgroup$
    – Kevin
    Feb 12, 2016 at 1:12
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(That's a long shot)

Hit all 99 camo ghosts once, wait a while, then if one remains, hit him.

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The riddle states that the ghosts turned camo through evolution and natural selection, so non-camo ghosts have a harder time surviving. Either they kill each other, or they have a predator in the mansion. If they have a predator, turning them all to blue should allow it to kill them all. If they prey on one another, in the end there shall be only one, and you have to hope that it will be weakened to pale.

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  • $\begingroup$ Cool answer but wrong $\endgroup$
    – Anthony Pham
    Feb 9, 2016 at 18:50
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Solution:

Hit the pale ghost, kill it. Wait until another one turns pale, hit it, kill it, wait until another turns pale, etc.

Reason it works:

If "due to evolution and natural selection" there are 99 camo ghosts and 1 pale ghost, it stands to reason (somewhat) that there should always be one pale ghost. If there wasn't a reason for it, then all the ghosts would be camo. Therefore, if all the ghosts are camo and you wait a while, one should become pale through some path of evolution/natural selection.

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  • $\begingroup$ If evolution and natural selection concepts can be applied not to living organisms, but to ghosts,then this solution is wrong.The reason is that, by killing the only pale ghost you will be drastically diminishing the number of carriers of the pale gene. A better solution is to allow the pale ghost to survive, so that his genes are inherited by at least some fraction of the following generation, and then kill all pale ghost except for a fixed number, to be determined by quantitative arguments. $\endgroup$
    – MariusMatutiae
    Feb 9, 2016 at 19:37
  • $\begingroup$ But given that the problem says the ghosts can live forever, "evolution" and "natural selection" must have different meanings for them than through procreation. I couldn't say specifically what those meanings are. I'm not a ghost. $\endgroup$
    – Duncan
    Feb 9, 2016 at 19:42
  • $\begingroup$ Pale evolved into camo... nice try though! $\endgroup$
    – Anthony Pham
    Feb 9, 2016 at 21:08
  • $\begingroup$ Sure, but the community of ghost evolved to have one pale ghost. Evolution can work on a group level too! $\endgroup$
    – Duncan
    Feb 9, 2016 at 21:38
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It says you only have to kill them with your baseball bat. So,

Punch them all until they are all pale, then finish them off with your bat.

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  • $\begingroup$ With only your baseball bat. Sorry. $\endgroup$
    – user18141
    Feb 9, 2016 at 19:54
  • $\begingroup$ @RikerW With only your baseball bat, how can you kill them all You only have to kill them with the bat. The other hits are not specified. $\endgroup$
    – Trenin
    Feb 9, 2016 at 20:10
  • $\begingroup$ You have to use the baseball bat $\endgroup$
    – Anthony Pham
    Feb 9, 2016 at 22:16
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They are ghosts, so they are already dead.

Done.

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    $\begingroup$ Hello @Solocuter, and welcome to Puzzling SE. While your response is valid in our world, the question itself (which is tagged lateral-thinking) has constructed a world in which the ghosts are pseudo-living entities, given that it states "The ghosts can live forever" and because they must take hits to be killed. In our world, we might be able to swing through multiple ghosts, but the world in the question has different rules (laws of physics, specifically) that must be respected to find the intended answer. Feel free to edit your answer to adjust it to the constraints of the question. $\endgroup$
    – raisinghellyer
    Feb 9, 2016 at 20:54
  • $\begingroup$ You have to use the baseball bat $\endgroup$
    – Anthony Pham
    Feb 9, 2016 at 22:16
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Ok. This is a much better answer than my previous.

Recoil does not exist, so I can hit the ghosts as hard as I want, knocking one into another into another .... . I line the ghosts up in a line and whack the first one hard into the second, the second hits the third, and so on... After 5 hits, they are all dead except the one on the end. I finish him with the 6th hit.

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  • $\begingroup$ The only weapon against them is a baseball bat, not themselves $\endgroup$
    – Anthony Pham
    Feb 9, 2016 at 22:16

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