Can you solve it? The treacherous riddle of the round table — SkimNews
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- Daniel Griller created six round-table logic puzzles for The Guardian's "Can you solve it?" column, scaling in size from 3 to 7 to 999 participants
- The first two puzzles place 3 people at a round table, each claiming "I am younger than the person to my left," asking for the greatest and smallest number of truth-tellers
- Puzzles 3 and 4 extend to 7 people, with each participant stating they are younger than the person to their left AND younger than the person two places to their right
- Puzzles 5 and 6 scale to 999 people making compound age claims about those three places to their left and right
- Griller is the author of puzzle books "Elastic Numbers" and "A Ring of Cats and Dogs, and Other Curious Puzzles"
- Solutions will be published at 5pm UK, with readers asked to avoid spoilers
Why it matters: The puzzles progress from a tractable 3-person scenario to a combinatorial 999-person problem, offering a graduated challenge that tests how truth-claims scale around a circle. Griller's puzzles are a regular feature of the column, and the round-table framing turns a simple logical constraint into a problem whose difficulty grows nonlinearly with group size.
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