You have a job for 7 days and you will get paid with 1 piece of gold per day. Problem is there's a block of gold made up of 7 pieces, and there is a knife that can cut it only twice. How would you solve this problem? Making sure the employee has the right amount of gold every day!

There are no tricks in the question like buying a new knife or whatever. There is a unique mathematical solution. Go!

I would take the block of gold.

Day one: cut off a segment and pay them. They now have one segment.

Day two: cut off a piece 2 segments big and give them that and ask for the first days gold back – they now have two segments

Day three: Give them the single segment again. They now have three segments

Day four: give them the remaining piece with 4 segments and ask for all the other bits back. They now have 4 segments.

Day five: give them the single segment. They now have 5 segments.

Day 6: Give them the ‘2 segment’ piece and ask for the single segment back. They now have 6 segments.

Day 7: give them the single segment. They now have 7 segments

Yeah I Googled it. 😎

@QAgMire I bet you did.

Oh hey look, binary code

Permissions!

This has to be a job interview question

The totally mathematical approach that solve the problem would be that:
Cut the piece of gold twice a virtually infinite number of times until you get infinitesimal bits of gold, you obtained these gold sand and you can now integrate definitely the sand in de gold to get gold pieces of arbitrary width. (the phisical representation it's to merge the gold sand)

You all get imaginary stickers. You're welcome!