Riddle # 1 Walkthrough-The Liar and Honest Village (Spoilers)

This post is meant to walk you through the thinking you would have to do in order to solve the Liar and Honest Village riddle. If you have not read the riddle question yet, you should click here.

Warning, reading below may spoil the answer. 


Here's some food for thought(Hint)

Notice that the liar guard's answer will always be the opposite of the honest guard's answer. Given that, so long as their answers differ, you won't be able to get anywhere in this riddle.

But that's the kicker.

So long as their answer differ.

So how do you get it that the guard will answer the same thing, no matter what village he is from?

There's your hint, if you don't want the answer, stop reading, you've been warned.

Answer(spoilers- no pictures to avoid spoiling, sorry!)

So you have to get the guard to answer the same thing no matter what village he is from. But how do you do that? Well, it might be easier to phrase the question differently:

• If he's from Honest village, how would you get him to answer like he's from Liar village?
• If he's from Liar village, how would you get him to answer like he's from Honest village?

Well, if he's from Honest Village, he would tell the truth. So if we ask him something like, "If you were from liar's village, what direction would you say the Honest Village is?". He would then answer like hes a liar, and tell you the direction to Liar Village. The other way is Honest Village.

If he's from Liar Village, he would say the opposite(lie). So if we asked him something like, "If you were from Honest village, what direction would you say the Honest Village is?". Well, he's from Liar Village, so he wouldn't give the Honest man's answer, he would give the opposite and lead you to Liar Village. The other way is Honest Village.

You might think, oh that's it! Except it isn't. You have to be able to combine these questions into one. This is how the first question of "If you were from Liar Village, what direction would you say Honest Village is" would look like this:

• If honest- He would give the direction to liar village
• If liar- He would give the direction to honest village

Which is no help. The same goes for the second question. Simply having them postulate if they were from a particular village is no help. They have to imagine being from the OPPOSITE village.

So the question would be something along the lines of: "If you were from the village across from yours, what direction would you say Honest village is?"

Answer

The result is this:

• The Honest guard pretends to be a liar- Gives Liar village's whereabouts
• The Liar guard pretends to be honest village citizen, but gives opposite response- Gives Liar village's whereabouts

And that's that. One of the classic riddles broken down. I hope this helps some people!