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jack"The world's most difficult logic puzzle!"
"As you are walking along a road you come to a cross-roads, at which stand three inhabitants of the island who are unfamiliar with boolean logic and double negatives. One of them..."
:)
(That's a reference to a Raymond Smullyan puzzle that several people have linked to recently, with three gods, who speak an unknown language, and answer truthfully, falsely, or unpredictably, and you have to work out which is which with yes-no questions. I think now I remember enough similar puzzles to know how to do it. Except that I'm sure I remember discussing a specific instance -- probably very similar except for the language irrelevant complication -- on livejournal, probably with simont, but I can't find that discussion now.)
"As you are walking along a road you come to a cross-roads, at which stand three inhabitants of the island who are unfamiliar with boolean logic and double negatives. One of them..."
:)
(That's a reference to a Raymond Smullyan puzzle that several people have linked to recently, with three gods, who speak an unknown language, and answer truthfully, falsely, or unpredictably, and you have to work out which is which with yes-no questions. I think now I remember enough similar puzzles to know how to do it. Except that I'm sure I remember discussing a specific instance -- probably very similar except for the language irrelevant complication -- on livejournal, probably with simont, but I can't find that discussion now.)
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Date: 2008-11-11 12:18 pm (UTC):) Yeah. That book can probably keep someone busy for the rest of their life, given how interesting each individual problem is. (I'm sure I recall Imre giving a talk about the christian and lion problem, or a related one, to trinity maths society.)
can I assume that your posting it here implies that you were convinced by the solution I emailed you last week? :-)
Alas, no. I skimmed through it, and it looked like a plausible case analysis, but I hadn't got round to thinking about it in detail. I nearly warned that there may not be a solution, or may not be an elegant solution but (a) the point was timewasting and (b) I hoped someone else might come up with an elegant/generalisable solution for us :)