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I hate when riddles are told badly and ruined. I remember the original one which was not solvable this way and really puzzled me. When resolving the one in the article I asked myself why I had found this to be much more complicated, and it was beacuse the number of bottles was 128 in the original.

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What do you mean? It works the exact same way for 128 bottles. 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1.

If I understand the GP comment correctly, the puzzle when they first heard it was for 128 bottles, which was a big clue that the solution involved binary, spoiling the puzzle for them. The article’s use of 100 bottles obscured the intent and made the puzzle harder.

“the original one which was not solvable this way” doesn’t seem to fit in that interpretation.

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