100 Prisoners and a Lamp

Re:100 Prisoners and a Lamp by popularopinion on Sunday November 24, 2013 @07:05PM (#6791787)

This puzzle has been on the XKCD puzzles wiki for several years. They have some very fun puzzles there. It's a huge timewaster, so only click if you have nothing pressing to do. http://wiki.xkcd.com/irc/puzzles#Prisoners

If you need help on any of the puzzles, hints and answers are on the talk page. For this specific puzzle, the talk page links to a paper by William Wu that answers this exact question with asymptotic analysis.

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/papers/100prisonersLightBul...

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Re:100 Prisoners and a Lamp by andlima on Sunday November 24, 2013 @08:43PM (#6792068)

This is a really nice puzzle! I didn't know William Wu wrote a paper about it. I saw it many years ago on William Wu's riddles site[1] (highly recommended). It's one of the most popular problems there. The original thread[2] in the forum has 25 pages, covering lots of approaches. There is also another thread[3] summarizing the discussion.

[1] http://wuriddles.com/

[2] http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board...

[3] http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board...

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Re:100 Prisoners and a Lamp by jd007 on Sunday November 24, 2013 @10:13PM (#6792303)

reminds of the good times i had with wuriddles in high school. definitely wasted many hours talking about the 100 prisoner problem and its variants with others back then. another one i liked was the sink the sub one

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