Hey Columbus people,
I'll be in town from Thursday around 10pm till Friday morning.
Wanna hang out?
Also, I'll take this time to describe what the hell this blog is. Its a place where stupid and not stupid shit can hang out...and do whatever. Post book/movie/recipe/life recommendations, things from the internet that are enlightening..or exactly the opposite. Post things like if you're going to be in Columbus, or Pittsburgh or something...or if something happened in your life that you want all of us to know about.
I'll also pose a puzzle here for you all (yinz since I'm in Pittsburgh) to ponder:
So a jailer puts ten prisoners in a line so that each prisoner can only see the prisoners in front of him. He also gives each of the prisoners either a white or black hat (you dont know anything about how many of each color hats there are). So prisoner 10 can see the hat colors of prisoners 1-9 ahead of him, but not his own hat. Prisoner 9 can see the hats of 1-8, but not his own or prisoner 10's. The game is... starting with prisoner 10 and moving up to prisoner 1, each prisoner has to guess the color of his own hat. If he gets it right, he lives and if he gets it wrong he dies. The guesses are said out loud and all the prisoners can hear each guess. The prisoners are allowed to determine a strategy before hand (and the jailer is even allowed to know their strategy). What strategy should the prisoners adopt to minimize the number of people who die.
It's not a riddle, meaning its not something stupid like "the jailer is a prisoner so he knows and can tell them" or anything else that makes it trivial. I heard this yesterday and it took me a while to get.
Alright...blog on.
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All the prisoners should just guess the color of the hat directly in front of then. Assuming everyone does this, at least 9 of the 10 would survive.
ReplyDeleteif the hat colors are alternated, then none of them survive.
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ReplyDeleteI guess what I meant was that 10 tells 9 what his hat is through his own guess. Then maybe, 9 could say the same thing as 10 saving himself. He could inflect his answer in such a way to tell 8 what his hat color is, as the prisoners could come up with a scheme were answering the hat question in falsetto means the hat in front is white, and answering in a deep voice means the hat is black, or something like that.
ReplyDeleteyeah...that would work...but thats not allowed..they all speak in the same voice. so your thing could save at least half...each even person would tell each odd person what their hat is and the odd person gets it right...but you can do better...in fact, you can save 9 of the 10
ReplyDeleteHow about pluralizing the color, such as "whites" or "blacks" to indicate the color of the hat in front in a predetermined code. Or is that also against the rules of this puzzle?
ReplyDeletei figured it out (RIGHT, deepak????) but i'm not telling because that would ruin the surprise. tom, that is breaking the rules again.
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