Party and Batteries

To celebrate the language school ending (for all but me), we congregated at my good friend PAM's house. The party was a blast. My favorite game was called Tourette's (sorry, I didn't name).


These are good friends of mine. From left to right, MIKE 2 (there are four MIKEs), me, ALISON, HAGGAI. This picture was taken at the party.


I apparently lost my bag of batteries somewhere in my apartment and/or my camera is broken. I know that made no sense, but I wanted to communicate two related ideas compactly. No, don't try to find a finite subcover (you will find my blog may cater to mathys as I now know an abundance, no apologies). I will also post puzzles and codes occasionally. I liked that from the livejournal days.

Here's a puzzle.

Three gods A, B, and C are called, in some order, True, False, and Random. True always speaks truly, False always speaks falsely, but whether Random speaks truly or falsely is a completely random matter. Your task is to determine the identities of A, B, and C by asking three yes-no questions; each question must be put to exactly one god. The gods understand English, but will answer all questions in their own language, in which the words for yes and no are 'da' and 'ja', in some order. You do not know which word means which.

• It could be that some god gets asked more than one question (and hence that some god is not asked any question at all).

• What the second question is, and to which god it is put, may depend on the answer to the first question. (And of course similarly for the third question.)
• Whether Random speaks truly or not should be thought of as depending on the flip of a coin hidden in his brain: if the coin comes down heads, he speaks truly; if tails, falsely.
• Random will answer 'da' or 'ja' when asked any yes-no question.

I'll give you a hint: This is very difficult. I could not solve this in a reasonable amount of time. Don't use the internet for the answer. Actually, I'll post the solution later if you want.