An officer has to solve a case with 20 suspects, 10 from colony A, and 10 from colony B. He can solve the case once at least 19 of them answer truthfully during an investigation.

The officer has two identical boxes labeled P and Q, which each have 20 cards, one for each suspect. Before each investigation, he takes one card from each box. He interrogates these two people during the investigation; the suspect from box P will tell the truth, and the suspect from box Q will tell the truth if and only if the suspect from box P is from colony A. (The officer can tell who's telling the truth.)

After each investigation, the officer will discard cards from truthful suspects (from both boxes) and return cards from lying suspects to the original box.

Find the number of possibilities that he can solve the case in 10 investigations.

I wonder whether the text correctly defines what one as a casual observer would see.

This suffered some intense scrutiny from different focii prior to appearing in public, hence my opening paragraph.

Commentaries and a potential solution are the reason for this comment.

If there is some error in the body text (which may be causing some remaining ambiguity) might you "Petition Director" and then "bug levik"?

Posted by brianjn on 2008-09-01 09:58:31