All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report
use Perl Log In
cog (4665)
{cog} {at} {cpan.org}
http://jose-castro.org/
Yahoo! ID: jose_alves_castro (Add User, Send Message)
Internacional Man of Mystery.
The two lions
I was once told that the human brain works in the background... and the proof to that was that sometimes you would be thinking of someone's name and not remembering, then stop thinking about it, and later on you'd remember, with no particular reason!
The question is: how does this work, and how long can the brain keep up with this stuff?
A couple of years ago I was given a problem I didn't solve by then... amazingly, yesterday morning, while still in bed, the answer simply ocurred to me
The problem:
You have two doors, the right one and the wrong one. Your objective is to discover which is the right door. Outside the doors there are two lions. One of the lions always tells the truth, while the other always lies. You are allowed just one question, to one of the lions, without ever knowing whether he's the one telling the truth or not. What will your question be?
I'll leave you with the problem for a while
--Larry Wall in stab.c from the perl source code
Solution (Score:2)
It's a very old and well-known puzzle.
3 Person Variation (Score:1)
There are 3 people - 1 always lies, 1 always tells the truth, and one randomly lies tells truth
You can ask two questions this time - both to the same person or to different people - still only two paths/doors though
The questions can't be compound (if this and this) - must be yes/no type questions - and can't create paradoxes
Now I stayed up all night and came up with a solution - submitted it to the author
If you like this sort of puzzle (Score:1)
Sometimes these are called knights-and-knaves puzzles (knights always tell the truth, knaves always lie). If you like them, you should really read some of Raymond Smullyan's [wikipedia.org] books. He's come up with tons and tons of interesting variations.
My favorite puzzle book of his is "What Is the Name of This Book?", although I haven't read some of his newer ones.