On our bus ride back from the Gardens, the bus was jam-packed. Ani and I found a nice open-looking spot near the back door. I ignored the yellow stripe and settled in. At the first stop, we found that the back door automatically (!) opens. It continued to attack us for the remaining 20 stops until we got home. We learned how to properly defend ourselves.
We went to dinner one night at a local pub. The local color was interesting. In particular, we sat next to two older (or just old?) couples. They had fun conversations about tennis (i was stoked) and politics. One lady complimented Anita and I on being a nice couple that reminded her of she and her husband. It was very sweet. Plus, her husband was a Catholic priest, so i think it was a good sign.
Anita challenged me with a couple of puzzles on the trip. The first I won't describe here except to post this link:
door puzzle
Momma and Tess, if you read this before your other (clearly worse) halves, you can challenge them with it. Be careful though, this almost wrecked Anita and I's friendship. I was so sure I was right. But she was the one asking the puzzle question! What an idiot I can be.
The other puzzle is given here. You're gonna have fun with this one. I'll post the answer later. I'll also respond to comments if you're stumped.
A bad guy buries three other guys up to their necks in sand as shown in the figure below. He then blindfolds them and puts hats on each of them as shown. It is critical that only the guy in back can see two hats. The middle guy can only see the hat on the front guy. The front guy can't see anything. The bad guy takes the blindfold off and says: you each have hats on. There are either a) 2 black hats and 1 white hat or b) two white hats and 1 black hat. Without speaking to each other, if one of you can tell me what kind of hat you have on, I'll let you all live. Otherwise you die. [edit: If one of you guesses what color your hat is, but is wrong, you all die.]
How do they survive? (They do survive.)
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5 comments:
I know ALL about the door problem. I learned about it in a book years ago and tormented Tim with it at the Time, and actually, I do recall tormenting mama with it as well. Mama, do you remember that? It is extremely frustrating to not understand the answer. I know, because just a month or two ago we were watching a movie that posed the question, and while I knew the answer, I couldn't remember why. So we had the whole frustrating debate all over again until we found this very wiki page. :) A fun problem to figure out though.
Now, your next problem, I can't figure out. I think I'm gonna have to google it.
Yes, I remember the door problem, and I still can't wrap my mind around the idea that switching improves the odds.
I'll have to think about the second one.
all 3 hear the question.
if they are smart they will follow the lead of the first guy who picks a color, either color and the deduce that if they all answer the same color "one" of them will get it right.
so long as "one of them" gets it right they live. even if 2 are wrong. no matter.
since one of the guys has to correct, they all live.
if the question is carefully considered it at least seems obvious.
each must hope the others have thought this through carefully.
i hate these kind of questions.
did i get it?
steve
re. the door.
seems to be once the doors are reduced from 3 to 2 you should simply make another random choice.
to take the other door is not random so might not increase the odds.
so put 2 marked dice in a hat, rattle them around and randomly pick a die. that would be a 50:50 choice.
with only 2 doors don't the odds simply reset, making each door equally likely to be correct?
steve
steve, on the 3 door problem, i thought the same thing you did would've just about staked my life on it. but that's wrong. see the wikipedia page.
tess, did you figure out the one with the hats? see the [edit] that i made to the post to clarify the problem.
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