The Lucky Cat, or Maneki Neko, is a traditional Japanese symbol representing good fortune.
The three Lucky Cats in this problem are wise beings who normally answer any question you have truthfully, but two of the Lucky Cats in this problem have been cursed by evil spirits who always lie. The only way to free them from the spirits is by figuring out the liars.
You decide to ask the first Maneki Neko, 'Are you cursed?' to which he responds, 'No.'
You ask the second Maneki Neko the same question, and she responds, 'No, the first one of us is.'
You ask the third Maneki Neko the same question as well, but his speech is muffled and you do not hear his response properly. You decide ask the other Lucky Cats what he said.
The first responds, 'He said yes.' The second responds, 'He said no, and accused me of being cursed.'
Who's cursed?
This section requires Javascript.
You are seeing this because something didn't load right. We suggest you, (a) try
refreshing the page, (b) enabling javascript if it is disabled on your browser and,
finally, (c)
loading the
non-javascript version of this page
. We're sorry about the hassle.
This is the age old liar and truthteller problem-with a twist.
For the sake of simplicity, I will mark the Lucky Cats as M 1 , M 2 , and M 3 .
M 1 says he isn't cursed,
M 2 says she isn't and that M 1 is cursed,
and M 3 's speech is muffled.
You ask the other two what he said, M 1 responds that M 3 said that he is cursed,
and M 2 responds that M 3 said that he is not cursed and M 2 is.
Now that we've summarized the data, we can get to solving the problem. First, let's assume that M 1 is the truthteller.
The first two situations check out just fine with M 1 being the truthteller, but the third situation-where he responds with what M 3 said according to him-gets a little tricky.
If M 1 is the truthteller, M 2 and M 3 must be lying. In that case, when M 1 says that M 3 said that he( M 3 ) is cursed, it must be true. If M 3 is lying, though, he couldn't say that he is cursed and have it be true. Therefore, M 1 being the truthteller doesn't check out.
This time, let's assume that M 2 is the truthteller. The first two situations check out just fine for her, and if what M 1 claimed that M 3 said is false, that checks out too. The final situation checks out for her as well.
M 2 is the truthteller, making M 1 and M 3 the cursed Lucky Cats. Just in case you want it, here's a situation describing how M 3 wouldn't be the truthteller:
If M 3 was the truthteller(making M 1 and M 2 liars), the first situation would check out just fine for him, but in the second situation, M 2 tells a partial truth, and since the cursed Lucky Cats can do nothing but lie, M 3 being the truthteller wouldn't make sense.