Truth-Teller–Liar Puzzles with Self-Reference

Abstract

In this paper, we use commonsense reasoning and graph representation to study logical puzzles with three types of people. Strong Truth-Tellers say only true atomic statements, Strong Liars say only false atomic statements, and Strong Crazy people say only self-contradicting statements. Self-contradicting statements are connected to the Liar paradox, i.e., no Truth-Teller or a Liar could say “I am a Liar”. A puzzle is clear if it only contains its given statements to solve it, and a puzzle is good if it has exactly one solution. It is known that there is no clear and good Strong Truth-Teller−Strong Liar (also called SS) puzzle. However, as we prove here, there are good and clear Strong Truth-Teller, Strong Liar and Strong Crazy puzzles (SSS-puzzles). The newly investigated type ‘Crazy’ drastically changes the scenario. Some properties of the new types of puzzles are analyzed, and some statistics are also given.

Keywords

• ss-puzzles
• sss-puzzles
• crazy people
• self-contradictory statements
• puzzle-graphs