I guess 1) was not supposed to work

Some variant of the riddle I found:

"An evil king has 1000 bottles of wine. A neighboring queen plots to kill the bad king, and sends a servant to poison the wine. The king's guards catch the servant after he has only poisoned one bottle. The guards don't know which bottle was poisoned, but they do know that the poison is so potent that even if it was diluted 1,000,000 times, it would still be fatal. Furthermore, the effects of the poison take one month to surface. The king decides he will get some of his prisoners in his vast dungeons to drink the wine. Rather than using 1000 prisoners each assigned to a particular bottle, this king knows that he needs to murder no more than 10 prisoners to figure out what bottle is poisoned, and will still be able to drink the rest of the wine in 5 weeks time. How does he pull this off?"

As EvilSOB and JustSid have pointed out there are a number of ways to solve this riddle without actually applying any serious thinking.

Another one:

Buy (or steal, because we're evil) some new wine. You're an evil king, you can afford it.

Put the wine on EBay .... Mwahahaahaaaa!

And use the proceeds to but something with a bit more 'kick'!


PS: But my #1 would have worked based on Ventilators original posting.
It says nothing about being un-dilutable...

Addition to #1: If ALLthe bottles are now poisonous,
put new labels on them and 'anonymously' gift them to the Evil Queen...

I prefer the 2nd version of the riddle.
Not because your solution 1) then fails... but being "evil" is way cooler than being "rather evil"

I like the 2nd version because the way it is worded makes my first answer sound like "the" solution rather than "a" solution (a time-based solution is still feasible, I think, but the way it says "he needs ... no more than 10" rather than "he only has 10" points away from a time-based solution that could arguably use less or more prisoners).

my time-based solution:

hour 0 : each prisoner tests 100 bottles
hour 2 : each prisoner tests 10 bottles from each 100 bottle group
hour 4 : each prisoner tests 1 bottle from each 10 bottle group

after 10 hours you know which 100 bottle group
after 12 hours you know which 10 bottle group
after 14 hours you know the exact bottle

you could also move it further apart if the poison isn't that exact.

Ooh, I like it. Very simple, and giving generous room for error in poison kill-time. That's easily transfer to the 1month/5week version of the problem as well. Nice!

http://imageshack.us/f/27/planeds.jpg/

couldn't resist

And I thought I was the only person who thought like that...

this was to much for me ... cool voice... but... see it
[video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ2yGQtdAak&feature=related[/video]