100 brown-eyed and 100 blue-eyed perfect logicians live on an island, but none knows the color of their own eyes. There are no mirrors on the island, and communicating is forbidden. If any of them works out the color of their eyes, they must leave the island in the night.
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One day a visitor comes to the island and says, "I see at least one person with blue eyes". What happens next? The surprising result is that nothing happens for a hundred days, then all the blue-eyed people leave, and the next night all the brown-eyed people leave.
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Replying to @propensive
It’s indeed counterintuitive, as the visitor provides no new information! Everyone already knows there’s at least one person with blue eyes.
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Replying to @runarorama @propensive
Everybody knows that there are at least 99 people with blue eyes.
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I thought that
@propensive wrote in another tweet that inhabitants of the island don't know the exact numbers. I think it only matters in this particular example that there's equal amount of people with each color and after `n` days one group leaves.1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @gorski_mt @martinpallmann and
So it might as well be: there's `n` people with brown, `n` with blue and after `n` days the brown ones left.
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There are several framings of the problem, but (I think) the number of brown-eyed people isn't significant, other than to emphasise the even probabilities of the eye-color of any person chosen at random.
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