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I just happened to see this story appear in our #rss-bot feed. How to Solve the World's Hardest Logic Puzzle. Given that this is the weekend, I thought it might make for an interesting challenge and discussion.
To set the stage for the puzzle, the author provides some background on Raymond Smullyan, the puzzle's composer:
While a doctoral student at Princeton University in 1957, studying under a founder of theoretical computer science, Raymond Smullyan would occasionally visit New York City. On one of these visits, he met a "very charming lady musician" and, on their first date, Smullyan, an incorrigible flirt, proceeded very logically—and sneakily.
"Would you please do me a favor?" he asked her. "I am to make a statement. If the statement is true, would you give me your autograph?"
Content to play along, she replied, "I don't see why not."
"If the statement is false," he went on, "you don't give me your autograph."
"Alright ..."
His statement was: "You'll give me neither your autograph nor a kiss."
It takes a moment, but the cleverness of Smullyan's ploy eventually becomes clear.
A truthful statement gets him her autograph, as they agreed. But Smullyan's statement, supposing it's true, leads to contradiction: It rules out giving an autograph. That makes Smullyan's statement false. And if Smullyan's statement is false, then the charming lady musician will give him either an autograph or a kiss. Now you see the trap: She has already agreed not to reward a false statement with an autograph.
With logic, Smullyan turned a false statement into a kiss. (And into a beautiful romance: The two would eventually marry.)
Clever! But enough with the setup — What's the puzzle?
The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever goes like this:
Three gods A, B, and C are called, in some order, True, False, and Random. True always speaks truly, False always speaks falsely, but whether Random speaks truly or falsely is a completely random matter. Your task is to determine the identities of A, B, and C by asking three yes-no questions; each question must be put to exactly one god. The gods understand English, but will answer all questions in their own language, in which the words for "yes" and "no" are "da" and "ja," in some order. You do not know which word means which.
The story's author is, himself, a bit of a puzzle-poser. The story tells how to solve the puzzle, but does not actually provide the solution. Are there any Soylentils up to the challenge?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 23 2016, @05:40PM
I contend that trumpkins are just as logical as anyone else.
They just start with fatally flawed premises.
Garbage in, garbage out.
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 23 2016, @07:20PM
Sorry, we can't all be such wonderful tolerant geniuses that we believe electing the blatantly obvious criminal wife of a serial rapist, who both already sucked America dry and is leeching off the corpse is a good idea.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 23 2016, @09:07PM
All we can hope is you get enough sense to realize that Hillary's flaws are no reason to vote for Trump's.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday October 24 2016, @01:14AM
Yep. Neither are prizes, nor fountains of morality, nor pillars of community trust.
It's a choice between a highly mentally unstable sexual predator with delusions of grandeur that exhibits scary tendencies towards belligerent and intractable vindictiveness punctuated by childish petulance....
and
a fairly nasty woman who absolutely is an elitist and as die hard of a believer as Trump that the elites are the noble cure to the world. The unwashed masses and labor merely need to be contained, controlled, and profited from. Plenty of evidence for this clear pattern of behavior on her part.
I'm voting for Hillary because Trump would be qualitatively and objectively worse to a very large and substantial degree. Not happy about it, but this is one fucked up choice. I would rather work with the new Democratic platform than the shitstain of ideas coming out of the Republican party. That platform couldn't be more bigoted, close-minded, and backasswards.
Either way may not make a difference. Trump has riled his base up so much with seething mistrust of government and epic levels of disenfranchisement. Those people are prepping for civil war, and at no point in our history have we heard more talk about it. Especially from presidential candidates, governors, and affiliated white nationalist and militant organizations.
It's fucked.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Farkus888 on Monday October 24 2016, @02:52AM
Speaking of Garbage in Garbage out. Your garbage knowledge of history lead to you making a garbage comment. The American people have had 2 civil wars. I could see you overlooking the revolutionary war being a civil war since we were part of the british empire but fighting against it. America won and pretends they were never really in charge now. The other is literally called the civil war and you should know about it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by edIII on Monday October 24 2016, @07:27AM
Well.... okay. I'll tell you what I know.
The Civil War had nothing to do with government mistrust, nor disenfranchisement *with* government. So excluding the Civil War, there has been no other time in history. Even during the Civil Rights marches and times of nationwide general strikes, there has not been as much fervor with replacing the government with an outsider, and eliminating the status quo and ideological opposition by whatever means.
Calm down, buddy. There is a difference between knowlege and interpretation of it. We have differing views perhaps, but my knowledge of history is quite adequate.
We never were though. From the beginning what we fought was rich monied interests in England manipulating our economy. They were attempting to stranglehold us while delivering the lions share of the fruits of our toil to the elites in England. Classic exploitation, starting upwards from chattle slavery through peonage and our modern day wage slavery in its advanced forms.
Did the exploitation stop? Did the common American man at the time escape such fates?
No. History shows that quite clearly with a cyclic Capitalistic economy utterly opposed to their interests, those being the interests of the common worker at every single step. Whatever niceties we have now are not because of the inherent morality of the elites in recognizing them, or granting them, or even providing it without commentary. Their commentary often came in the form of fantastic and violent abuses leveraging police, military, and the courts to keep Capitalism on track.
History shows us this. We were never in charge.
The Civil War was fought because of two opposing forces of monied interests. Southern had near complete and assured control over government, while Northern interests were being neglected in favor of repaying English debt owed by the South. Economies at the time were dependent upon cotton and competed with Egypt. When Northern interests captured the influence of the government they immediately shifted the balance of trade by imposing tariffs designed to promote Egyptian cotton and force the disparate economies of the North and South to come under one rule, and one economy, and ONE group of monied interests served.
Slavery is to the Civil War as humanitarianism was to the freeing of Kuwait in the 1st Persian Gulf war. Sounds good and noble, but the truth was that the black man was too much competition to the white man already fighting European immigrants brought over by their own troubles as much as the monied interests desire for imported peonage. 3 forces, or 4 depending on how you count were played against each other. As Jay Gould said, "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half".
As Gould is burning in hell, his insight proves that from the very beginning it wasn't a people divided fighting each other, but a small group of men exhorting great influence and causing it to happen. There is a documentary similar to it called Trading Places.
The interests of the black man were just as much aligned with the interests of the white man, and the immigrants, and this was recognized by the rising working force throughout the Industrial Revolution. They called the North the UNION forces for a reason. Entire worker Unions emptied out to leave and free the slaves as much as it was to end the death grip that Northern monied interests had upon them.
Nobody at the time was confused that government had anything to do with it. They KNEW it was corrupt as fuck, just as we do today about ours.
You misunderstood me. I didn't mean to imply that never before has there been more talk about Civil War, but never before has there been more seething mistrust by government by ALL sides at the same time. I don't think slaves underlying hatred against their masters counted, and they were not free to participate save those that escaped to the North.
This is truly different this time as the target of the revolution is actually against the government itself (a local one, not a foreign one), big corporations, and now apparently the media thrown into boot. If a sizable chunk of this radicalized segment of the Republican party become militant they will not be targeting progressives or Democratic citizens, but the edifices and institutions of government itself.
From the other side with an unlikely Trump win, you have over half of the United States so disenfranchised with government and completely opposed to the charter of the Republican Party. When Trump fails to support the working class and repeats ol' Abe's impressive gang raping of America in the largest unearned money grab of all time, America will break.
If Trump has said anything right, it's that America is a complete fucking disaster and not the greatest country in the world right now. The Democrats are being disingenuous and stupid by saying America is already the greatest and getting better. Objectively, we've only been getting worse, and it's about to get a whole lot more worse. As we're already strained so highly with social services and increasing measures of austerity, we've become a forest thick with dangerous tinder.
All it takes is a spark.
How many more jobs we will lose next year that are replaced by jobs pimpled teenagers subsidized by their parents? How many more parents can be subsidized by their parents? How many of those shit jobs will be replaced by automated kiosks that complete the circle bringing back defacto electronic chattle slavery competing with the working force again?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 24 2016, @03:13AM
> The unwashed masses and labor merely need to be contained, controlled, and profited from. Plenty of evidence for this clear pattern of behavior on her part.
And any evidence to the contrary? Or does that not count?
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday October 25 2016, @02:21AM
There is extremely little evidence to the contrary. Other than her recent push to create Progressive policy, which can still be interpreted cynically, no.
Listen to her speeches. Read what Wikileaks had provided. It's not a fatal blow, or even perhaps especially scandalous, but it shows how she feels about the average person versus the elites. One person in public, one person in private (read: in the company of the elites). That's fucking terrible.
Her 6 years as a board member of Wall Mart don't do her any favors. She never spoke up, or against the worker, but in fact helped anti-union activities.
In the past when she tried to give us health care, she was beaten down brutally.... but instead of continuing to fight for us she joined the other side of the health care debate. She took money from them.
Very little in her favor other than im-not-Trump.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Monday October 24 2016, @10:36AM
"I will vote for a fascist criminal who bribed her way out of judiciary because the other guy is celebrity who gets more sex than me." - edIII (791)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 24 2016, @12:26PM
Yeah, because there are only two candidates you can vote for. Oh, wait …
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Monday October 24 2016, @02:30PM
Oh I am sorry, I thought this more than yet another 'lets bash a successful man who isn't me' thread.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday October 25 2016, @02:27AM
He isn't successful, but a con man. We don't refer to criminals as successful.
Interesting, that despite his monstrous character flaws (pun intended), that you think objections must simply be due to jealousy.
I can see the level of intelligence you possess, and no, I will no be joining you in the kiddie pool to play around :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday October 25 2016, @01:04PM
Going to vote Hillary because Trump is a criminal. I suppose some people really really like the Ministry of Truth.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday October 25 2016, @02:24AM
I will fully admit he gets WAY more non consensual sex involving assault then I do, Sure :D
Other than that, you made no substantive points whatsoever and effectively were nothing more than a monkey flinging poo around.
Bad Monkey!
Lol
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 23 2016, @09:08PM
Exactly what I'm talking about!