There happens to be a politician that might lie at any moment (this isn't unusual) but his conscience bothers him enough (now, that is unusual!) so he won't say two lies in a row.

He said ten consecutive statements.

How many combinations of truths/lies can there be?

I'm surprised no one else has noticed that this puzzle is a repeat. It is not a duplicate, so I did not object to it in the waiting queue, but it is the same puzzle as "Climbing the Stairs" (pid 190).

If you look at this site,  you will see that "Climbing the Stairs" (called Leonardo's leaps on that page) is the inverse of "Chairs in a Row- the anti-social version" (empty chairs correspond to steps tread on, full chairs to skipped steps); and the "teachers" version corresponds to this puzzle if teachers are liars.

The link button placed the URLs in quotes and pre-appended the URL http://perplexus.info so the links don't work.

The correct urls are: http://perplexus.info/show.php?pid=190  and http://www.mcs.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/R.Knott/Fibonacci/fibpuzzles.html/ 

Edited on February 28, 2004, 11:04 am

Posted by TomM on 2004-02-28 10:46:45