From How to Solve the Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever, by Nautilus‘ assistant editor Brian Gallagher, comes a study of Raymond Smullyan’s logic puzzle of the same name, deriving from use of a logician’s law; the “law of the excluded middle”, which is that “every statement is either true or false—there is no middle ground.” And “In the hardest logic puzzle ever, one must determine the true identities of gods named True, False, and Random.“

The law is a law of statements, not a law of answers.

Could we entertain banqueting with the god named Both? Could the conversation take us out, flying into the real world, flying to divers places, accompanied by Mercury to get us everywhere?

Image: “Mercury Bronze 1570 van der Schardt 5” by mharrsch (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0): https://ccsearch.creativecommons.org/photos/2d615852-04af-4e54-8850-956ddf5ba076