History of the Muddy Children Puzzle

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 8 Jun 2026] History of the Muddy Children Puzzle Hans van Ditmarsch The Muddy Children Puzzle is a puzzle about knowledge and ignorance that has been inspiring for the development of epistemic logic. Who came up with it first? This is unclear. We trace the origin of the Muddy Children Puzzle through logical and literary publications over the past two centuries. The puzzle inspired a numerous variations such as involving numbers or coloured hats. We also present a novel hats puzzle involving self-reference. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); General Literature (cs.GL); Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO) Cite as: arXiv:2606.13703 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2606.13703v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.13703 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Hans van Ditmarsch [view email] [v1] Mon, 8 Jun 2026 07:45:05 UTC (2,701 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.GL cs.LO References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)