Last month, when I was in a discussion
group, the group leader threw out the following quiz: “Imagine waiting in line at the post office. There is one person in front of you and
another behind. The door suddenly bursts
open and in walks a man. He has a bag
containing 4 hats (2 white and 2 black).
The man makes everyone in the line shut their eyes, takes 3 hats from
the bag and places one on each person’s head.
Then he tells you all to look straight ahead and open your eyes, thus
ensuring that each of you can only see the colour of any hats directly in front
of you.
The
man then issues his ultimatum. “First,
you are not allowed to say anything to one another. Now, if any of you can correctly state the
colour of the hat you are wearing, all 3 of you will live. However, if you get it wrong then something
nasty will happen to all 3 of you.
Not
surprisingly, you are shocked. After
all, you only came in for some stamps and a bar of chocolate. After about a minute of pin-dropping silence
you suddenly name the colour of your hat.
There are no mirrors or reflective surfaces in the post office, so how
do you do it?”
I knew the answer right away. That was not because I was smart, but because
I had read this quiz in the book Puzzled:
101 Cunning Conundrums and Sneaky
Solutions by one of my favourite writers Richard Wiseman. And in fact I could vaguely remember
encountering similar stories in novels by Taiwan writers when I was in
secondary school. Soon enough, some
members of the discussion group came to the right answer. No one asked, and thus I did not know whether
they were smart or they had read about it.
Have readers got the answer yet?
If not and if you want to try on it, don’t read the following paragraph
yet, as I shall give the answer.
The answer was pretty
straight-forward. The colour of my hat
was different from that of the one in front of me. The essential point was that you did not miss
the important “minute of pin-dropping
silence”. Of course the one in front
could not see anything including the colour of his hat. But the one behind you also did not give an
answer. That meant he did not see 2 hats
of the same colour in front of him.
Otherwise he could deduce easily that his hat was of the other colour
because there were only 2 white and 2 black hats. So, I was wearing a hat with a different
colour from the one in front of me.
That was not the end of discussion. Otherwise it was super
“primary-school-chicken” and I would not have joined. The follow-up question was, “You were killed in the incident even though
you worked out the answer. Logic killed
you. Why? Do readers have any ideas?“
There were not one, but unlimited answers
to it. But all those answers could be
summarized in one sentence: “You are
living in the real world!” In the
real world, any one of you might freak out and run around, causing the man to
kill you all. The other 2 might not be
intellectual enough to understand the complicated instructions. The one in front might be a gambler and knew
nothing about logic, and just yelled out whatever colour that came to his
mind. The one behind might be silent
just because he was too shock to think or to say anything. Last but not the least, the man was likely to
be crazy. Crazy man did not talk logic. He would just kill you, no mater how smart
you were and what you said.
Remember?
I did not say what occasion or what discussion group it was. In fact it was a survival skill discussion
group: survival skills in recent hostile environment. Here and now is where and when logic would
likely get you killed. There are
numerous examples involving government officials, law enforcement bodies, and
even scholars of renowned institutes. It
is logical to list some examples. But do
not forget that I have equipped myself with survival skills. So, please figure them out yourselves.
The discussion group did not end by
bringing your thought out of the box but leaving you with
learnt-helplessness. We were guided to
come up with some strategies to survive this
real-world-illogical-scenario. We were
given video clips and newspaper replica of how people who appeared in Yahoo’s
Top Local Searches talked and behaved.
Although readers have not paid for the discussion group, I am generous
enough to give you some hints and directions.
You know what? We even had role
play to work out who could survive and who definitely died. The fittest guy confessed that he was
inspired by the movie of Stephen Chow.
He first assessed correctly the man was in power, no matter his power
was legitimate or not. He then knew that
he should figure out what would be in the man’s mind, no matter he was crazy or
not. He acted according to his
conclusion. He took off his expensive
watch and handed it to the man. He
survived.
I was a dead man.
(Source: HKMA News October 2015)
