On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 10:28 PM, Dan Asimov <dasimov@earthlink.net> wrote:
I heard it from Peter Winkler, who said he heard it independently from each of Noga Alon and Ehud Friedgut. (So it's not clear who composed the problem in the first place.)
--Dan
More history of the vector puzzle: The vector puzzle was posted as a card problem at this IBM Research site in 2003 http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/wwwr_ponder.nsf/challenges/February2003.... and a solution was posted the same day. The problem was "sent in" by Michael Brand. The solution was not credited to anyone as far as I can see. I found that link in a Mathoverflow discussion of the same problem in 2009 here: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/7493/a-riddle-about-zeros-ones-and-minus-o...