Riddles, brain puzzles and mathematical problems

[MyRedNeptune]

Neptune is on fire!

You got it again

There are actually many ways you can do it, but you got the key idea that you can use 2^10 = 1024>1000 possible combination of rats. Therefore 10 rats is the minimum requirement. All you have to do is to associate the combinations with certain bottles.

Well done.

Yay! Actually, I'm stupid. I just realized that I don't even need to use 2 rats for each step. Instead, I can use just 1, making the minimum number of rats 9 instead of 18.

I'll go edit my post to reflect that.