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Showing posts from May, 2014

A Puzzle: The Unfair Millionaire

This is a logic puzzle I came up with over twenty years ago, when I was in high school.  I will post the solution in a separate post in a week or so, if nobody solves it before then. Once upon a time, a bored and whimsical millionaire invited five of the world's most prominent logicians to his house for a game.  The winners were promised a prize of five million dollars.  (The losers, needless to say, were promised nothing.)  "But you must use logic," said the millionaire.  "This is no game of chance!" The millionaire placed a hat on each of their heads such that nobody could see the color of their own hat.  They could only see the colors of the hats on the other logicians' heads.  They were told that the hats were randomly selected from a batch consisting of five white, three red and one black hat.  The logicians were then numbered one through five and told that they would be asked, in order, if they knew the color of their own hat.  They would have to p