The secretary at a computers company is pregnant! It may have been one of the three partners' fault, or maybe someone else's. If a partner was the guilty party, he knows it... but he doesn't want the others to know it was him.

The three partners agree that they must know whether it was one of them who made the girl pregnant (thus possibly allowing a suit against the company) or if it was someone else.

How can they decide if one of them is to blame, without anybody having to accept being the father, if that was the case?

(Some notes: They might just write on papers either "I DID IT" or "I WASN'T IT", but the handwriting might give the guilty party away. Putting a white or black marble in an urn (white=innocent, black=guilty) might work, but someone could possibly see what color was being put in; also, if the guilty one went first, the second could peek inside and realize the answer. The optimum solution should not require much --or any-- extra equipment, and should "resist" inquisitive partners. And, of course, being all of them quite capable hackers, computers are out of the question!)

First they should just ask the secretary if one of them is responsible, but if tshe doesn't tell them or if they don't beliveve her then they can do this:

One of them could print out three identical pages that say 'guity' and three identical pages that say 'innocent', these pages should be made with a computer & printeras to make them indistiguishable from one another (to the naked eye), in other words they should be free of identifying marks. The 'guilty' and 'innocent' papers should be print on identical sheets of paper.  Each one of them should recieve one of each type of paper. Upon receiveing their papers each will go to a different location and fold up the correct paper in a manner identical to his two co-workers. They will then return and put the correct papers in a container and shake the container so the order the paper were put in can't be figured out. they will then discarded the incorrect paper(folded up in an identical manner to the correct paper) into the same waste basket, which also will be shaken for the same reason. they will then read all the papers in the container containing the correct responses.

Posted by Jon on 2004-09-10 05:54:26