Can you solve the prisoner hat riddle? - Alex Gendler

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only one serious problem of this riddle : everyone must understand your plan

Unfortunately when you pick 10 humans at random there's gonna be a lot of idiots

Even if one person in the group could figure this out, imagine trying to explain this strategy to 9 other average humans in 5 minutes.

3:25 Was this whole thing just a setup to call me short? Because you're absolutely correct, and I applaud you for calling me out in such a subtle, yet clever fashion!

Me an intellectual: takes off my hat and looks because it’s not against the rules

Alternate strategy: Take off your hat and look. It's still allowed via the rules given

Realistically, the aliens would've also said that they aren't allowed to touch their hats, or otherwise remove them from theirs or each others' heads, to prevent them from just looking at their hats or switching them around.

“Quick, What do we do?!” “No idea…”

"Now it all comes down to you, in the front of the line." Curses genetics for making him short

blind person: exists the nine other prisoners: yeah we're screwed

We did this in special ed class a while ago, and it was quite a traumatizing experience, as my classmates didnt explain it to me and I kept failing everytime, so I went crying in the corner

“But their civilisation forbids eating highly logical and cooperative beings” That does not describe humanity at all 💀

Imagine everything is going as planned and the last person calculates his colour wrong and everyone dies

Imagine actually coming up with this genius plan and spending the next 5 minutes carefully explaining it to everyone, just for the last person to screw up and cost everyone their lives.

This can be extended to any amount of colors. Let's say we have three colors red, green and blue. First we assign a value to each red=0, green=1, blue=2. The person starting to guess a color adds up the color values of each hat he sees and takes it modulo 3. For example for a lineup of (r,g,g,r,b,g) the sum would be 1+1+0+2+1=5%3=2, so he says blue. The next one does a similar calculation 1+0+2+1=4%3=1 and subtracts this from what the last person has said, leading to 2-1=1=green and so on. Interestingly, the riddle gets simpler if you use an infinite amount of colors. Again assigning values to them, and for simplicity just consider the values instead of colors. The person starting simply adds up all the values and says the corresponding color. Now the next person does the same and subtracts the result from what the last person said. So for a lineup of (12,2,43,29,1), the first one says 2+43+29+1=75, the second 75-(43+29+1)=2 and so on.

Adisson Anderson is legitimately one of my favorite people on earth. His voice is the one all of my positive thoughts are set in.

"It all comes down to you" Me: wHiTe

honestly, if this plan was explained to me without any visuals within 5 minutes, i wouldn't even understand it 💀

my comp-sci teacher used to give us this problem when we started the logic module. it takes surprisingly long for a group of 12 year olds to figure out a solution for this.