There is a land where every inhabitant is either a day-knight or a night-knight. Day-knights tell the truth in the day and lie at night. Night-knights lie in the day and tell the truth at night.

Three inhabitants A, B and C are currently engaged in a conversation. A visitor approaches the three inhabitants and ask each of them their types. They say:

A: If asked, B would claim it is morning.
B: If asked, C would claim it is morning.
C: If asked, A would claim it is night.

Is it day or night? What is the type of each of the inhabitants?

Assuming that morning is defined to be equivalent to day, to include the period of day before evening, with evening defined as part of night, it is night, and A and C are night-knights and B is a day-knight OR A and C are day-knights and B is a night-knight.

Morning is defined as either dawn to noon OR midnight to noon.  The latter definition creates an ambiguity allowing all three inhabitants to be soothsaying night-knights with the time of day to be night-time morning. Given either normal definitions, the three inhabitants could also be lying night-knights, for instance, if they knew each other would actually falsely claim it were afternoon even if it were day-time morning. Other possible combinations exist given that afternoon is neither morning nor night...unless afternoon is taken to be the period between noon to midnight, which would allow another possible combination or so.

Edited on August 4, 2013, 7:10 am

Posted by Dej Mar on 2013-08-02 12:48:56