This paragraph is truly unusual. Look as long and hard as you can, and you will find out why. Although my gimmick is not obvious, all of you can find it, without any particular skills or schooling. If you don’t find anything odd at first, don’t worry! You can think about it a bit and still find a solution.
What is so unusual about this paragraph?
A bored king wanted to find out which of his advisers was the wisest, so he summoned his three oldest wise men.
“I am going to sit you in a triangle and blindfold each one of you,” he said, “and paint either a red or a blue dot on your foreheads. I will then take the blindfolds off, and if you see at least one red dot, you will raise your hand. The first man to determine the color of his own dot is the wisest.”
The king then blindfolded them and painted a red dot on each man’s forehead. When the blindfolds were taken off, all three looked at each other and raised their hands.
Ten seconds later one of the wise men proclaimed, “I have a red dot.”
How did he know?
The “perfectly logical being” (PLB) is both the title of my blog and one of my favorite concepts. Since they are found primarily in logic puzzles, they are never sitting around watching TV or enjoying a cookout. Instead, they spend their time dividing up cakes that are too small at parties that are too large, narrowly avoiding executions by picking the right colored hat, and trying to weigh ten friends at once without a scale.
What are the attributes of a PLB? The book How Would You Move Mount Fuji lists them as follows:
Personally, I think perfectly logical beings also tend to fall into two distinct groups: the cutthroats and the altruists.
The cutthroats are found in puzzles where a cake will be divided up and you want the biggest piece, or some of you will die and you want to be a survivor, or you’re vying for first place in a contest. In these puzzles, the assumption is that every participant has the same goal, the same lack of scruples, and (most importantly) the ability to make deductions about what each other participant will do.
The altruists are the opposite. They pursue any option that reduces the total suffering of the group, even if it ends with them falling off a bridge or being executed by an insane king. The altruists are a little like a colony of Vulcans.
Neither type of PLB ever considers cheating or bending the rules. They never change their answers to help a friend, or lie to hurt an enemy. In fact, they behave nothing like human beings whatsoever. In my mind, that’s one of the things that makes logic puzzles so interesting.