Moser's worm problem

Okay, imagine you have a bunch of apples in a basket. Each apple has a worm inside it, and you want to take out all the worms. But you don't know which apples have worms and which don't.

Moser's worm problem is like trying to solve this puzzle. Instead of apples with worms, we have a tray full of boxes with balls inside of them. Each box might contain one or more worms, and we can't see inside the boxes to check.

Our goal is to figure out which boxes have worms and which ones don't. We can do this by picking up some of the boxes and shaking them. If a box has worms inside, we'll hear them moving around and make a note of it.

But there's a catch: we can't open every box to check, because that would take too long. So we have to figure out the minimum number of boxes we need to shake to be sure we've found all the worms.

It's like a big game of hide-and-seek, but instead of one hiding place, we have lots of little ones. Moser's worm problem is figuring out the best strategy to find all the worms as quickly as possible, while shaking as few boxes as possible.