The Bookworms' Burrow
In the book "The Moves that Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life," Jonathan Rowson attempts to describe his own concentration process in a game of chess and presents the following puzzle:
This challenge is revealed by a logic puzzle that I love, which I learned from the philosopher of mind John Hawthorne. The puzzle concerns three men on an island who all have blue faces. It is wonderfully convoluted, so please suspend disbelief, forget common sense, and search for the Sherlock Holmes inside.
The situation on the island is a little delicate. The three blue-faced men see each other every day, but none of them can see his own face. They all know that their face is either red or blue, but if any of them discovers the colour of their own face they have to shoot themselves at the next stroke of midnight exactly. Those are the rules. A little twisted, I know, but clear enough to live by.
Careless talk costs lives, so they don’t speak to each other, and never dare to see their own reflection. Yet despite the pressure and ambient tension, they live together in blissful ignorance for several years. Then one day a Scottish tourist called Jim arrives on the island, all the way from Glasgow. Jim chose this island because he was trying to shake off an incipient midlife crisis and couldn’t face the tedium of another beach holiday in Spain.
