Sunday, March 25, 2012

100 professors

By request, here is the puzzle Jimmy set for me at the art soiree.

You enter a room containing 100 professors (it is actually irrelevant that they are professors, but I want to be faithful to my source).  The majority of them are honest, and will answer any yes/no question truthfully.  The rest are dishonest, and will answer yes/no questions randomly (NB: not necessarily falsely).  You have 198 questions with which to learn the honesty or dishonesty of every professor.  Tell me a plan that is certain to work.

Jimmy didn't explicitly mention it, but each professor knows whether each of the others is honest or not.

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