Prisoner dilemma

[borisp]

I wasn't necessarily accusing you of anything other than a common logical mistake, which usually goes something like "I can't imagine any way this is possible, therefore this is impossible." (Religious nuts love this line of reasoning.) I didn't really mean to come across as a jerk, but in retrospect it's pretty ridiculous for me not to expect otherwise. You don't necessarily have a poor imagination...but everyone's imagination fails, and it happens pretty often to everyone, especially those that choose to ponder these kinds of puzzles [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[David Steele]

I don't see how this works, the way the problem was described.
The guards could just go back and forth with the counter-guy and another guy and not have anyone else in for a long time.
The counter guy sets the other guy resets. How can the counter -guy tell when/if the other 28 have been in?

D.

[vhawk01]

They could go back and forth with a select few as long as they want, but those guys are just gonna be flipping the noise lever. This is going to take a LOT of iterations, because the only times the info lever is ever being flipped is either:

1) A guy comes into the room for his first time AND the lever is down
2) The counter comes into the room and the lever is up

In all other situations, only the noise lever is being flipped. If the guards are choosing at random, this is going to take probably thousands of iterations before he claims all have been through the room. Anyone wanna do the math real quick and figure out how many it should be?

[yteba]

Pretty boring switches. They just go up or down. Someone should die or something when you hit the switch, also WAY to long an explanation after which they problem is still pretty foggy. I say this version of the prisoners dilemma sucks.

[borisp]

[ QUOTE ]
Anyone wanna do the math real quick and figure out how many it should be?

[/ QUOTE ]
After about 3 minutes of thought, I think this would best be solved via numerical simulation on a computer. Without some nontrivial simplifying idea, it seems pretty intractible.

[vhawk01]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Anyone wanna do the math real quick and figure out how many it should be?

[/ QUOTE ]
After about 3 minutes of thought, I think this would best be solved via numerical simulation on a computer. Without some nontrivial simplifying idea, it seems pretty intractible.

[/ QUOTE ]

There is a reason I asked if anyone else wanted to do it and didn't work at it myself. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[vhawk01]

[ QUOTE ]
Pretty boring switches. They just go up or down. Someone should die or something when you hit the switch, also WAY to long an explanation after which they problem is still pretty foggy. I say this version of the prisoners dilemma sucks.

[/ QUOTE ]

Its not a version of the prisoners dilemma.