{"id":244,"date":"2005-01-24T15:05:33","date_gmt":"2005-01-24T20:05:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/server97.snhdns.com\/~ravik\/wp\/?p=244"},"modified":"2005-01-24T15:05:33","modified_gmt":"2005-01-24T20:05:33","slug":"speaking-of-puzzles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200501\/speaking-of-puzzles\/","title":{"rendered":"Speaking of Puzzles&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My erstwhile coblogger, <a href=\"http:\/\/seven_times_six.blogspot.com\/2005\/01\/irrational.html\">Pradeep Ravikumar<\/a> has a post arguing that our brains aren&#8217;t designed to solve abstract mathematical problems, but they have evolved to be good at predicting the behaviours of other living beings. That&#8217;s a good point, and I can substantiate that with a puzzle.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nSuppose that there are five pirates who&#8217;ve stumbled upon a stash of 100 gold coins.  Now these pirates have a strict order of seniority among them. Pirate 5 is the most senior, followed by pirate 4 and so on till pirate 1, who is the most junior. The rules for distributing booty among the pirates is as follows: The seniormost pirate proposes a distribution, and all the pirates (including the proposer) vote on it. If 50% or more of the pirates vote for the plan, the plan survives. Otherwise the proposer is executed and the cycle starts again with the next most senior pirate. Assuming that the pirates are selfish like most of us &#8211; they like gold coins and they don&#8217;t want to die- and also assuming that they are perfectly rational, what distribution should the seniormost pirate propose?<br \/>\nAnswer only if you work it out yourself. Don&#8217;t copy it from elsewhere. <\/p>\n<p>(Full disclosure: I&#8217;m not the author of the puzzle.  I will source it properly later)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My erstwhile coblogger, Pradeep Ravikumar has a post arguing that our brains aren&#8217;t designed to solve abstract mathematical problems, but they have evolved to be good at predicting the behaviours of other living beings. That&#8217;s a good point, and I can substantiate that with a puzzle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}