“RE: The Little Old Man With Good Teeth and Shaky Hands: Puzzling Logic”

On 11/5/04, Sean McMains said:

>Fun to finally understand how it works.

I first heard the original version of this puzzle on NPR last year, and when they gave the solution I got quite irritated with the guy being interviewed for being so *obviously* wrong.

After spending a little time on it, the solution suddenly clicked and I was completely dumbfounded. In fact, I still get a little thrill with it.

The best part of the puzzle is not in finding the right strategy, but rather in understanding how it works.

Some of the explanations out on the net (like those in rec.puzzles, and the one he used on NPR) are so obtuse I still don't understand why they bother to explain it that way... while true, they're too bizarre to help anybody understand. (I was trying to find other versions of the puzzle before writing my own, that's why I was looking.) Some of them talk about the remaining shell "inheriting the probabilities" of the others, etc., etc.

Seth