"The world's most difficult logic puzzle!"

[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.)

Comments

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Do you two know each other? I can do one of my patented wrong-headed introductions :)

Simon, this is scribb1e, who's very deadly playing board games, married to Paul Wright, has a very nice smile when she's about to do something exciting, is reading through world literature including the bible from the start, and I know via dancing and via alextfish and woodpijn.

Sribb1e, this is Simon, who I know via SGO and the Carlton, an emritus matho (ie. was a mathmo), who is always very friendly and a very good source of interesting maths questions. He wrote PuTTy and "How to report bugs effectively", which includes a nice metaphor about antelope.

[scribb1e.livejournal.com]

Hi Simon! I'm trying to work out if we've met IRL. I was a mathmo too, same year and college as Jacob of PuTTy.

[simont]

Oops, I've only just noticed this comment (since of course I didn't get a notification email for it, because it wasn't a reply to one of mine). Belated hi to you too! :-)

I don't think we've met IRL, but it's not completely impossible. Since I don't know your RL name or appearance, though, it's hard for me to be sure of that. You have access to both of mine, though, so you're probably in the better position to judge...

[scribb1e.livejournal.com]

Oops, indeed, I'd forgotten that I try to be invisible online. Doh. I thought your face looked familiar and thought we might have met at some point. Er... see this: http://scribb1e.livejournal.com/13683.html

[simont]

Aha, thank you. Hmm. Your name might conceivably ring a very vague bell, but the face doesn't, so I'm going to have to suppose that we haven't met (unless someone can point out that I've been forgetful).

(Curiously, you're not the first person to ask me whether we've met without giving me enough information to answer. Perhaps in the other case the idea was that if we had met then we'd have done an LJ-names introduction and therefore I'd know...)