Re: S, B, and a puzzle by Boolos, Smullyan, McCarthy

From: Eric Cavalcanti <eric.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2004 18:23:09 +1000

On Wed, 2004-10-13 at 12:15, Eric Cavalcanti wrote:

> As an extra challenge, can you think of a way to
> find out if JA=YES in some of the outcomes? It
> would involve different questions, but I think it
> should be possible in principle.

I thought about that problem more, and I am convinced
that in fact we can't. The reason is that the first
question can be answered by the random god, and in this
case we don't gain any information out of that. So
we only have really 6 'good' outcomes.

On another view, we can say that the extra outcomes in
the 'states' 5 and 6 represent the extra bit of
information about what the random god actually answered.

Eric.
Received on Wed Oct 13 2004 - 04:26:44 PDT