A logical treatment of noise: Solving The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever and its generalizations

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Vallstrom, Daniel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866918530443640832
author Vallstrom, Daniel
author_facet Vallstrom, Daniel
contents Raymond Smullyan came up with a puzzle that George Boolos called The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever.[1] The puzzle has truthful, lying, and random gods who answer yes or no questions with words that we don't know the meaning of. The challenge is to figure out which type each god is. The puzzle has attracted some general attention -- for example, one popular presentation of the puzzle has been viewed 10 million times.[2] Various "top-down" solutions to the puzzle have been developed.[1,3] We present a systematic bottom-up approach to the puzzle and its generalization. We prove that an n gods puzzle is solvable if and only if the random gods are less than the non-random gods, for arbitrary cardinals. We develop a solution using 4.15 questions on average to the 5 gods variant with 2 random and 3 lying gods. We introduce an algorithm and an implementation for finding solutions to the generalized problem, together with upper bounds. Finally, we note that random gods act like noisy sources, which provides a connection to fault-tolerant computing.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2201_09801
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A logical treatment of noise: Solving The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever and its generalizations
Vallstrom, Daniel
General Mathematics
03B80
Raymond Smullyan came up with a puzzle that George Boolos called The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever.[1] The puzzle has truthful, lying, and random gods who answer yes or no questions with words that we don't know the meaning of. The challenge is to figure out which type each god is. The puzzle has attracted some general attention -- for example, one popular presentation of the puzzle has been viewed 10 million times.[2] Various "top-down" solutions to the puzzle have been developed.[1,3] We present a systematic bottom-up approach to the puzzle and its generalization. We prove that an n gods puzzle is solvable if and only if the random gods are less than the non-random gods, for arbitrary cardinals. We develop a solution using 4.15 questions on average to the 5 gods variant with 2 random and 3 lying gods. We introduce an algorithm and an implementation for finding solutions to the generalized problem, together with upper bounds. Finally, we note that random gods act like noisy sources, which provides a connection to fault-tolerant computing.
title A logical treatment of noise: Solving The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever and its generalizations
topic General Mathematics
03B80
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.09801