Talk:Puzzles/Logic puzzles/Gold Coins

This needs to be clarified some more. In particular, it is not clear whether the pirate that proposed the solution gets to vote on it, due to the ambiguous nature of the phrase "remaining pirates." -- Dan131m


 * Indeed, there are a number of possible variations:
 * Does the proposer get a vote? (Y/N)
 * In order for the game to end and the money be divided, must the division be voted for by more than 50% of the electorate (M), or merely at least 50% of the electorate (L)?
 * What are the pirates' priorities exactly? Thinking about it, since a pirate who is thrown overboard doesn't get any gold, "greedy, and do not want to die" gives a total ordering of outcomes - death at the bottom, followed by survival albeit going away emptyhanded, followed by winning progressively larger amounts of gold.  But what if the score is tied in this respect?  I can see a few possible ways they might break the tie:
 * (A) Vote for, so as to save the other pirates
 * (B) Vote against, so as to kill as many as possible of the other pirates
 * (C) Choose the option that minimises the largest amount of gold any other pirate takes away
 * (D) There's no predicting how they'd vote, and so the proposer must be prepared for each pirate to vote either way


 * The way it's written at the moment, it's ambiguous on question 1, takes the M answer to 2, and doesn't address 3 at all. The solution given appears to be the case YMD.  (YM and NL are equivalent, as the proposer would always vote for his own split if given the vote, but since the puzzle statement is explicit about M it must be YMD.)


 * There's yet another complication, which makes a difference only in case NM. If there is only one pirate left on the ship, can he just take the gold, or must he still play by the rules?  In the latter case, there is nobody to vote for him, so there's no way he will get more than 50% of the votes, and so he must throw himself overboard.  This would mean that the youngest pirate is guaranteed to vote for whatever the other one proposes when there are only two of them left.


 * Brilliant has two versions of this puzzle, with combinations NLB and YLB. But I'm thinking what would be ideal is if we could cover each of the possible combinations of parameters in some way.  Probably by posting each as a separate puzzle.... Smjg (discuss • contribs) 22:37, 18 April 2015 (UTC)