Prisoner problems / riddles

Oh, is that what that was all about.

 

If you ask one of the guards what the other guard would say if you asked which door leads to freedom, you then choose the opposite door and you are guaranteed to be right.

 

Supermarkets & fast food chains concoct contests all the time that involve collecting tickets or stickers to win prizes. Take the McDonalds Monopoly contest, where one ticket, Boardwalk, wins the grand prize. Only one Boardwalk ticket gets printed.

I haven't researched this but just tried to work it out logically: would picking up 10 tickets from a single McDonalds or 1 ticket each from 10 different McDonalds yield different probabilities of getting the Boardwalk ticket, or would the probabilities be identical? Assume that all tickets are already distributed to all the McDonalds.

 

Thanks. I knew it was something of the sort, but I was too lazy to draw a diagram to analyse it.

So allowing you to ask each guard a question is a red herring. You only need to ask one guard one question. Clever.

However, unrealistic. My experience of prison guards during my six months in federal prison is that they are far too pathological to be as reliable as the riddle claims. Most will lie, but if the truth will hurt a prisoner, they'll make an exception and tell the truth. And they NEVER offer prisoners games in which it is possible to win your freedom. They've got a real bug up their nice person when it comes to making sure prisoners don't get out. Except in the Federal Prison Camps, where there is no perimeter security and prisoners can just walk away if they choose. But to be in an FPC you have to have "out status," which the Bureau of Prisons assigns to prisoners that it has decided can be allowed out of the prison.

Yes, we actually have "prisons" where the BoP itself has decided that NOBODY in the prison presents any danger to society whatsoever, and that from a security standpoint, everybody can be allowed to leave the prison. Of course, if you do, they'll find you and then put you in a real prison. At FPC Yankton (South Dakota), where I spent the first two weeks of my term, there is just a low picket fence around the property, which you can step over, and no guards at the perimeter. We actually crossed a public street to go to the dining hall and the gym, and we did so without supervision. The only thing keeping us in was the threat that they'd find us and put us in a real prison if we walked away. Several times a day we had to be in our rooms to be counted. And we were locked in at night, and for short periods during count. At FCI Sandstone (MN) there was a chain-link fence topped with a coil of razor wire. And at El Reno (OK) there were two concentric chain link fences and the space between then was filled with razor wire and there were guard towers with machine guns at the corners of the yard, and if you got too close to a fence they'd shout through a loudspeaker "Get back from the fence."

Assuming the tickets are distributed entirely at random, it makes no difference whatsoever where or when you buy the ten tickets. Ten in a bunch, one at each of 10 locations, or ten from one location at different times, or any combination. Your chances of getting Boardwalk on each purchase are identical. Until the willing ticket is revealed, at which point your chances drop to zero.

 

^ These days, the lines are a little blurry between prisons being an instrument of punishment, and a detention facility to segregate dangerous persons from the rest of society. It's not my patch really, but I would think that if a person commits a crime that results in no real 'harm' to 'society' then an administrative punishment.....or at most a little time at the house with an unattractive anklet might be in order.

Like I said.....it's not one of the top turds on my pile where non-violent and relatively low level crime is concerned. We used to get the occasional protesters when I was in the tennis-shoe Navy, and just having a federal conviction on the records of those that stepped over the line, both figuratively and literally is a just punishment for me. Most of these folks represent little or no danger to the population at large other than perhaps an additional security challenge to guarding weapons and other federal property.
Having some familiarity with both sides of Daniel's crime, I would have probably just tagged him with a felony conviction and a suspended sentence if I were judge for a day, but that's just me.

Note to would-be protesters:
Post 9-11, it’s a little bit more dangerous to do some uninvited gardening on federal property where anything preceded by the word “nuclear” is stored. PLEASE! Just march around the fence with a sign if you have to get the protesting thing out of your system!!!
Yell at the politicians. Make up lies on political boards.
Don’t make some 20-something year old service person have to level a loaded weapon at you and work his (or her) way through the shoot/don’t shoot problem!!!!

Violent criminals?
Segregation usually takes care of the punishment problem, and for the worst of these my sinful nature tempts me to offer the "lady or tiger" riddle to them and just put tigers behind both doors......but that's not in keeping with my belief system. So… I have to settle with paying "experts" to grapple with the punishment versus redemption challenge.

YMMV!

 

Riddle 0: Don't leave the room.

 

Or until the McDonald's you are buying from, runs out of tickets.

 

FWIW, I've never been charged with a felony. The most I've been charged with was a class A misdemeanor plus a class B misdemeanor. On other occasions it's ranged from a class B misdemeanor all the way down to something called an "infraction," which they told me was a step below a misdemeanor, and treated jurisdictionally much the same as a traffic ticket would be. On a few occasions when I participated in nonviolent civil disobedience I was not even arrested. The Air Force and the cops just ignored us, and after a few hours of protesting, we went home.

The anti-nuclear movement, though small, is alive and well, though I have not been active in it for a couple of decades. The people who do civil disobedience are typically committed and highly motivated by an understanding that nukes are weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction, weapons that if fired (which the U.S. has demonstrated its willingness to do twice in the past, and states officially that it is willing to do again) would kill hundreds of thousands or millions of innocent civilians while poisoning the landscape for hundreds of miles around.

Nobody should engage in civil disobedience without understanding the theory of nonviolence, and the possible ramifications of their actions, or without formal nonviolence training. It is not something to enter into lightly. But in my opinion it is fully justified by the bloodcurdling horror of such weapons, and I admire the people still engaging in such protests and willing to accept whatever consequences may follow.

 

My bad. I thought federal prison = felony.

Actually, we prefer "launch" or "shoot" to the word 'fire'. Communications are rather important when you're at battle stations, and the word "fire" is easily misunderstood for the "rapid oxidation" kind which would be something of a distraction.
I'm not going to cross foils with you on the ethics of SIOP. People on both sides have been misrepresenting their half of this argument for almost 70 years now.
I have been to Hiroshima though.
Didn't look all that poisoned to me.

Me too.
Well...most of them.
Some of them do really REALLY dumb stuff, buuuuuut that's libs for you!

 

Lots of people make that mistake. Federal prison just means you were sentenced to prison in a federal court. In my case, the state didn't want to prosecute something they saw as basically a non-crime (or a crime of too little significance to be worth the expense of a prosecution and imprisonment).

Noted.

There were lots of birth defects, some very serious, for a long time after. I don't think radioactive contamination can be determined by a visual inspection, though.

There are arguments for and against the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. There are also arguments for and against the bombing of Nagasaki, though I think those are weaker, since Japan had not yet had time to respond. Obviously, I feel the bombings were not justified.

But my point was that the U.S. has made it clear that it is willing to use such weapons, and is willing to use them against an enemy that does not have them, and is willing to be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into a conflict. To those of us who take the moral position that killing civilians is never justified, this makes nukes a legitimate target for any kind of protest that does not harm the people guarding them. If the guard must face the question "Would I kill an unarmed and peaceful protester to protect a weapon of indiscriminate mass destruction (when that weapon is not under any actual threat from the protester)?" then I think their having to ponder that question is a good thing. Protesters have damaged the exteriors of the silos, though I did not, but the nukes themselves are at no risk of damage under all that steel and concrete.

 

P.S. I have had very scary-looking automatic weapons pointed at me by young guards who looked to me even more scared than I was. Once it was what someone told me was a 50-caliber machine gun, mounted on the top of a contraption that looked like a tank with wheels rather than caterpillar treads. Other times it was what someone told me were M16's, though I'd have no way of knowing what exactly they were. Once, the guards who arrested me had a german shepherd dog. One of them told me "Don't make any sudden moves. This is a military working dog." I never make any sudden moves while being arrested anyway. (Part of my nonviolence training.) Then one of the other guards got between the dog handler and the dog, and the handler chewed the guy out something royal. He said to him, in a voice full of anger and military authority, "Don't you EVER get between me and my dog!" I felt kind of bad for the guy. I like dogs, so I wasn't worried, since I had no intention of becoming violent. But they knew I am nonviolent (we had a long history of protesting there) so I think the dog was an attempt to intimidate me.

But in all my protests, and in all my arrests, I was never treated discourteously by any of the Air Force guards, and I never spoke rudely or angrily or critically to them. I did speak to them at every opportunity about the moral illegitimacy of weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction. We had a slogan, printed on a huge banner, that distilled our view: "US AIR FORCE: GOOD PEOPLE, BAD PRODUCT." (In North Dakota it's the Air Force that operates the nuclear weapons.)

Prison guards are another matter. Psychopaths, most of them.

 

I never spoke rudely to the guards, and while some inmates did, most did not. Yet we were subjected to constant insults and verbal abuse. Once when I was in solitary, and not permitted newspapers, a particularly demented guard told me that some anti-nuclear protesters had been shot and killed. I asked for names or details and he claimed not to remember. This could have been friends of mine. It took two weeks for a letter from me to reach friends, and a reply to arrive, telling me that it had never happened. This guard had told me that (possible) friends of mine had been killed, just to make me suffer for a while. To call the man a pig would be an insult to pigs.

I had never uttered a rude or unfriendly word to this guard, yet he was constantly insulting me. He was the worst, but it was the rare guard who did not insult us on a daily basis.

Hollywood presents prisons as a place of constant fights and riots where guards have to respond with equal or greater violence. Real prison is nothing like that. Most inmates obey the rules and just want to do their time as easily as possible and offer no resistance or insult to the guards. Yet the guards in the federal prisons I was in -- Yankton (SD), El Reno (Oklahoma), Oxford (Wisconsin), and Sandstone (MN), were for the most part viciously rude, insulting, and generally nasty. Not all of them. I'd say maybe 90%.

And remember that violent criminals are a VERY small part of the federal prison population! Most of my fellow prisoners had not done anything to hurt anybody.

Interestingly, while I was in jail (my experience of jails was limited to North Dakota, Yankton SD, and Ashland WI) every guard I encountered was polite. The jail guards I encountered never responded to insults in kind and always respected our basic rights.

Also interesting is that although I was mostly in low-security prisons (and Yankton was zero security) I did spend a week in a high-security prison (El Reno) while being transferred, and there, most of the guards left us pretty much alone. The guards were nastiest in the prisons where the prisoners were the least dangerous! Typical cowardly bullying behavior: picking on people who will not fight back!

I'm sorry about your friend and his daughter. Our courts go far too easy on drunk drivers.

 

I actually misread the riddle. I thought he was only allowed to ask one question, not one question to each guard. One question to any guard is all you need.

If you ask either guard how the other guard would answer the question " does the door you are guarding lead to freedom?

So if you happen to pick the liar and ask the liar how truth will answer the question about his door if truth did have the freedom door then the liar would have to lie and No. Therefore you pick the opposite answer. You really don't need to know if he is lying or not. You just pick the opposite.

If you happened to ask the truth guard about how the other guard would answer the question then you know the truth guard will tell you that the liar guard will answer yes, so you therefore take the opposite door.

I guess it would have been easier to say door 1 is freedom. You then ask either guard how the other guard would answer does door number one lead to freedom. If the answer is yes from either take door 2

Only one question needs to be asked to one guard, and it doesn't matter whether the guard is truth or liar.

 

Most assuredly yes. Although in the classic prisoners' dilemma the prisoners are NOT permitted any communication.

But this contestant was brilliant - and I doubt he made a mistake.