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Hats Puzzles

Recently, I have created a one hour talk about three puzzles and how they can be solved or understood using some concepts of computer science.
The title of the talk reads: Hats off to theoretical computer science.

Before starting the talk, I make a point to make the following disclaimer:

This is not a theoretical computer science propaganda talk. It is simply aiming to solve/understand solutions of three puzzles. The title is a bit catchy. But the "hats off" part of the title comes simply because all the puzzles are hats puzzles.

Here is the talk. (Special thanks to S. P. Suresh for introducing cool fonts.)
You may want to download and view it. Try solving the puzzles. Let me know if you find another approach to solve them.

The last puzzle alone can be material for a one hour talk. Here is a link available on Google for the last puzzle alone. What is amazing about these slides is, they have solved the last puzzle using Nim games. (google to find out what Nim games are). I haven't yet seen the solution. Lets see if we can figure this out.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hmm. If you were supposed to give a talk to attract students to pure mathematics or to physics, how would you go about doing it?

Try to answer .. And not dodge. I want to hear your answer.
5:47 AM
Anonymous said…
There is a difficult version of the second puzzle. Suppose there were countably many prisoners, standing at 1, 2, 3, ... and the jailer visits them in that order. Can you save all but finitely many?

Indraneel
1:05 PM
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