Opening poem: “I Have Just Purchased the Burst Sonic Pro 2.0 with Timer, Pressure Sensor, and LED Display,” by Greg Sevik, published in The North American Review, Fall 2026.

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In the main segment, Deke and Kel dig into the story the film Total Recall was based on. You can read it here. Deke connects the story, about a society that tampers with our memories, adding false ones, hiding real ones, to Descartes and Sextus Empericus. Kel finds all this talk about the nature of reality quite trippy indeed. Eventually, he drags the conversation into the gutter, specifically PKD’s obsessive focus on a certain female body part. A good time was had by all.

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LAST EPISODE’S PUZZLE:

(27) When I came upon the above problem [the first knights and knaves puzzle], it immediately struck me that C did not really function in any essential way; he was sort of an appendage. That is to say, the moment B spoke, one could tell without C’s testimony that B was lying (see solution). The following variant of the problem eliminates that feature.

Suppose the stranger, instead of asking A what he is, asked A, “How many knights are among you?” Again A answers indistinctly. So the stranger asks B, “What did A say? B replies, “A said that there is one knight among us.” Then C says, “Don’t believe B; he is lying!”

Now what are B and C?

SOLUTION TO LAST EPISODE’S PUZZLE:

The answer is the same as that of the preceding problem, though the reasoning is a bit different.

The first thing to observe is that B and C must be of opposite types, since B contradicts C. So of these two, one is a knight and the other a knave. Now, if A were a knight, then there would be two knights present, hence A would not have lied and said there was only one. On the other hand, if A were a knave, then it would be true that there was exactly one knight present; but then A, being a knave, couldn’t have made that true statement. Therefore, A could not have said that there was one knight among them. So B falsely reported A’s statement, and thus B is a knave and C is a knight.

THIS EPISODE’S PUZZLE:

(28) In this problem, there are only two people, A and B, each of whom is either a knight or a knave. A makes the following statement: “At least one of us is a knave.”

What are A and B?

[answer to follow next time, along with a new puzzle…]