The commissioner apologises for a brief glitch. Re-posting the case below to ensure that notifications happen. (I temporarily thought the case had needed to be changed, but I was mistaken.)
Case 7 report pending from Detective @Griffster77.
“This is it, team! One more case, and then everyone gets to take a holiday! Unless another animal crime wave takes place, in which case I’ll need you back at your desks first thing in the morning. But what are the chances of that happening? Our rating is a solid 85%, and it’s time to get this final dastardly culprit behind bars of a species-appropriate size. Let’s get to work!”
Case 8/8, dossier 12.
Time brackets:
(a) <= 4 mins
(b) 4-6 mins
(c) 6-12 mins
(d) 12+ mins
(x) not using a timer
7 suspects, 1 culprit, 3-4 lies
Summary
Bear did it!
I don’t want to mess with people’s scores, so please don’t include me in the scoring, but that took me 1min, 51sec, and I tend to do logic puzzles very free-form, so it’s probably wrong, but:
Let’s assume Peacock is telling the truth (why not). That means Horse is lying, which means he is not the culprit, and Bear is lying, which means either Panther or Peacock (or both) are telling the truth, which is correct already (because we assumed Peacock is telling the truth). That means Shark is lying (liar 3), which means Iguana could be telling the truth if Bear did it, which means Dog is telling the truth, and then Panther is telling the truth. Three liars, Bear did it! I think!
<4 minutes
Bear is the culprit and is lying, as are Shark and Horse.
I started with dog, since if dog is true then the culprit is known. Dog true means panther and iguana are true and bear is false.
Horse cannot be true becuase horse is taller than bear, which would contradict dog’s statement.
If horse is false then peacock is true and shark is false. This is logically consistent, since bear is not the tallest liar, and has the requisite number of lies.
Including checking to my satisfaction, that took me almost dead on 3 minutes.
4-6 minutes
Bear did it, Bear, Horse and Shark are lying.
For sure, I won’t add a single case report; but in case you feel inspired to work through the previous 7 cases as well before the other case 8 reports are in, it’d be no trouble for me to add you to the score table! (I can automatically recalculate the whole thing at a keystroke.)
1 Like
Untimed. Too hot. Also I was writing up my reasoning as I went.
As we’ve seen before, a simple “X is lying” generates a pair which we know contains one true and one false. Here that’s PE+SH. Leaving them aside we have 2-3 lies in 5 statements, so also 2-3 truths.
I’ll assume BE as my first candidate culprit because of IG and DO’s statements, which are therefore true in this case, as is PA’s. That’s three truths, so all remaining statements in the subset (HO, BE) must be false.
PA is true, so BE is false.
If HO is false, the tallest liar is HO, who is not the culprit, so HO can be false.
(And that means PE is true, so SH is false.)
This satisfies all constraints so Bear did it (and Shark, Horse and Bear are lying.)
1 Like
< 4 minutes
Bear is the culprit. Bear is lying (Peacock and Panther are telling the truth), Horse is lying (they’re the tallest liar and they’re not the culprit), and Shark is lying (Peacock is telling the truth).
Yeah just started with Dog/Iguana being true and checked if that worked. It did.
2 Likes
Gave up on the timer
I did a number of tests to prove once and for all that Bear is the culprit.
Test 1. a) Assume Horse 
→ Horse 
b) assume Horse 
→ Horse ). We know for sure Horse is innocent. This reduces Dog and Iguana’s statements to the same! They are either both liars or truthtellers
Test 2. Assume Bear → Panther → Iguana , Dog | Peacock | Because Panther’s lie makes Iguana or Dog 
→ Horse → Too many lies. We know for sure Bear is lying.
Test 3. Assume Panther → Iguana , Dog , Peacock → Shark → too many lies. We know Panther is telling the truth.
Test 4. Assume Peacock → Shark , Horse → this makes Bear the culprit per the truth from the horse’s mouth, and Dog , Iguana → not enough lies. So Peacock and conversely Shark , Horse
Known facts:
: Horse, Dog, Iguana
: Panther, Peacock
: Bear, Shark, Horse
The last two are linked so Dog and Iguana are which means Bear is the culprit
My initial hunch was to test how things would go if Dog was telling the truth
I think part of what is making me incredibly slow is my need to prove that this is the only solution. I could have been very fast. But I just can’t. I had to find hard proof.
2 Likes
Where dossier 12 is particularly fun for me is
that statement by Horse, “the tallest liar is the culprit”.
Horse is the tallest suspect.
If Horse is the culprit, the statement needs to be both true and false.
All the other statements we’ve seen are either “liar statements” (here PE, SH, BE) or “culprit statements” (here PA, IG, DO). This is the one that crosses the line.
3 Likes
I agree that’s a good one. I had to really wrap my brain around that one.
3 Likes
I almost changed this case, and that bit was the reason I kept it :).
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Oh yes, that’ll add a bunch of time in most cases! It’s a property of the game that each case has exactly one solution, so it’s completely safe to stop the timer once you’re confident that a solution works.
(I’ll check any unexpected answers for even-more-unexpected validity, though :).
3 Likes
I once worked on a tool called MGTP during my university days which was trying to find counterexamples for logical statements. Apparently this is still stuck in my brain.
In any case I am enjoying the puzzles immensely.
4 Likes
I don’t know if this is a potential stopping point, but I’m more than down to keep going.
2 Likes
Once we have the final reports from Detectives @Griffster77 (case 7, 8) and @RossM (case 8), I’ll wrap this game up with a final score. I can run either 1 or 2 more games (depending on player interest and availability) to cover dossiers 13-20 (which have multiple culprits).
6 Likes
Sorry work and family life just got very busy.
I spent some time working on these while waiting in the car this morning, so possibly not ideal conditions!
Case 7 - 6-12 mins
Dog is the culprit, Dog and Horse are lying
Case 8 - 6-12 mins
Bear did it with Shark, Horse and Bear lying.
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On and off over about 4 days, and I'm still mainly on vibes as I'm struggling to work out one of the statements.
Shark? I did not get what Horse is going on about at all.
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Ok. Thanks all for the discussion, as I’ve again hit the post. But now Ive seen that X must be true AND false thing, it finally makes sense.
2 Likes
The commissioner looks around the room.
"Well team, that was an adventure. Those suspects sure are some tricky customers! Good work to everyone, and special congratulations to @Assussanni who wins the coveted Detective of the Month award for July! Well done!
"I’ve tallied up all of our results, and can tell you that we’ve scored 3650 points out of a possible 4520 for a solid final rating of 81%. I’ve prepared the celebratory tea and biscuits in the staff room.
“As promised, you’ve all earned yourselves a holiday! Some of you have already submitted your leave requests, and I’ll be approving those shortly, just so long as there aren’t any more of those pesky—”
3 Likes