You are on a treasure hunt, wondering where the "Truth Treasure" is buried. You have no idea where it is buried, so you go Truth Town (made up of only Liars and Knights) because it is famous for holding the treasure's secret location.

When you enter the city, you see two twins and they know each other's types, but you don't. One twin says "(Exactly) one of us is a Knight..." and the other twin says "...and (exactly) one of us is a Liar." You can only ask one question and only to one person. You only care about where the treasure is kept, and obviously a liar would give you a wrong answer, so what should you do?

I agree with Fletch, and I believe his answer is correct.  He said: "ask either of them where the treasure isn't! "

But unfortunately, if it were this easy to find the treasure, someone would have found it by now.  In fact if any previous treasure hunters had asked random citizens "where's the treasure?", someone would have happened by chance upon a Knight and been told the exact location.  So unless the treasure is either enormous, or is informational content rather than gold, then the treasure is long gone by now.

Which then begs the question, how is the Liar going to respond to Fletch's question if the treasure is all gone?   The Liar's head would probably shake back and forth rapidly and finally explode like Harcourt Fenton Mudd's robot women in the "I, Mudd" episode of Star Trek   (or the fembots after a bit too much Austin Powers "maooh-jaooh")

Posted by Larry on 2005-07-05 20:43:48