Page 230 of Claim Me
Marcel’s mouth parts just slightly, and I catch that small crack before it disappears.
"You don’t brute-force probability," Blue adds. "You map structure."
Marcel clearly realizes that what he thought would take time was already over before it really started. Then he chokes down an involuntary growl.
"Fine!" he says. "It was too easy. Something harder!"
"Seriously?" Gunman hisses.
"That was easy?" Edgar mutters, looking like a lost puppy, probably lacking around one hundred IQ points needed to follow.
Marcel ignores him, leans in just a little, rubbing his forehead.
"You have eight coins. One of them is heavier. You get two weighings on a balance scale. Find the heavy coin."
The numbers run through my head. Two weighings don’t feel like enough, but I don’t even have time to process it before the answer comes.
Blue doesn’t even look like he’s thinking.
"Three, three, two," he says in a bored tone.
Marcel’s eyes narrow. "What?"
"First weighing splits them into three groups. If they balance, the heavy one is in the remaining two, and the second weighing resolves it. If not, you isolate it within the heavier group using the second weighing."
He pauses and tilts his head, letting the answer sink in.
I watch Marcel’s face, and this time the gaping reaction stays there a bit longer; he’s obviously losing his footing.
"You’re answering too fast!" Marcel says, sounding somewhat sulky, and there’s something almost desperate under the words now. I guess he really wanted to demolish Blue with logic puzzles.
"You already know it!"
"You’re asking standard questions," Blue replies with a yawn. "If you want the game to entertain me beyond school level, ask something worth it."
Something in me rises at that, a flicker of relief. I just know Blue will win no matter what. It’s basically his game now.
Marcel exhales through his nose, then straightens, and when he speaks again, his tone takes on an edge like he’s done with anything that can be dismissed so easily.
"Alright," he says. "Let’s see if you can handle this."
He pauses, probably to create a suspenseful atmosphere.
Then the voice again.
"Are you for real?!" Gunman is practically foaming at the mouth in irritation. Yet again, Marcel ignores him.
"A perfectly rational agent is told this: you will be killed on one day of the coming week, and the day of your death will be a complete surprise to you, meaning you will not be able to deduce it beforehand."
The words settle in my head and twist into something vague. Even without fully understanding it, I can feel the contradiction building inside the premise.
"The agent reasons that it cannot be Friday, because if they are alive on Thursday night, it would no longer be a surprise, so Friday is eliminated. Then Thursday is eliminated for the same reason, then Wednesday, and so on, until no day remains," Marcel’s voice gets more excited as he reaches the end. "And yet the execution still happens, and it is still a surprise." He leans forward a fraction. "Explain that!"
I expect Blue to slow down this time, even just a little, because this one sounds like it actually demands serious brainpower, but he almost smiles.
"You’re collapsing levels of knowledge into each other," he says, like he’s correcting another school mistake.
Marcel’s expression hardens. "Answer it!"
