Logic for Fun: First Demo
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Philosophical Railway
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It happened, in the days when trains used to call at the tiny
village of Much Tittering in the Woods, that the 1215 once
pulled up there and stood for the best part of an hour. Nobody
now remembers why. At any rate, the driver, the porter, the
signalman, the stationmaster and the guard spent the time in
such merry conversation as is customary among employees of
railway companies. Their names, in alphabetical order, were
James, Kant, Locke, Mill and Nietzsche. For reasons lost in the
mists of railway history, they agreed to make two statements
each, one true and the other false. They said:
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| MILL: |
Nietzsche is the stationmaster.
James is either the guard or the porter.
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| LOCKE: |
Neither Kant nor Nietzsche is the signalman.
Mill is not the stationmaster.
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| KANT: |
Mill's second statement was false.
Locke's first statement was true.
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| NIETZSCHE: |
Either James is the porter or I am.
Neither Locke nor Mill is the guard.
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| JAMES: |
I am not the signalman.
Nietzsche's second statement was false.
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What was the driver's name?
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Click on PROBLEM ENCODING below to see what this looks like in logical
notation. It may seem complicated, but in fact you can quickly learn to read
and write this kind of thing. Clicking on SOLUTION on the encoding page will
give you the answer to the problem, exactly as the solver prints it.
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