Adventure Gamers - Forums

Midweek Puzzle

The Samaritan Paradox is unfortunately NOT a game I can wholeheartedly recommend, though it does have a lot of good ideas. It has a story within a story in the form of chapters of a book, that our real world protagonist is searching for, and whenever he finds one it switches to the book story with a different protagonist (in the screenshot). On top of that it also has two completely different plots, where one is based on the real life Bofors scandal, which I assume is also the reason for the title, and the other plot is of a more personal nature.

The main problem is that the game is simply not large enough to contain all of that, and the result is that both plots/stories are really only half told, before it all comes to a rather abrupt and clumsy end. A perfect example I believe of a one man project that simply started too ambitious and wasn’t able to follow through.

It does however have a handful of interesting and well designed puzzles, which is the reason I selected it for this weeks puzzle special, and one of those, my absolute favourite, is really a kind of old school riddle.

You are stranded on a deserted island where there is a dragon, and as we all know dragons does, it challenges you to a challenge, or rather as it turns out, it is us that has challenged the dragon, but if we don’t play along it will just eat us instead.
I’m going to put the actual challenge in spoilers, just in case there are someone who plans on playing the game, and don’t want to know this in advance:

On this Island there are three poisonousness springs located at different elevations, water from a spring at a higher elevation can however also work as an antidote for a lower spring. So if you drink water from the 1st spring, then you can just use water from the 2nd or 3rd as an antidote, drink from the 2nd spring and the 3rd works as an antidote, drink from the 3rd and you are totally screwed as there is no antidote!
There are also non poisonousness sources of water on the island.

The challenge is simple, you each bring the other a bowl of water that she has to drink, and the one who is still alive an hour later is the winner!

But here is the catch, [spoiler]the 3rd spring is located at top of a steep cliff, and you have absolutely no way of getting to that spring, whereas the dragon can simply fly there![/spoiler]

So it seems that the deck is stacked against us, there is absolutely no way we can win, defeat the dragon and live to tell the tale - but there is, and the solution is actually quite simple!

If you believe you can figure out the answer, fell free to post it but remember to use spoilers - and no cheating with walkthroughs!

Edit: Added one of Giom’s clarification points to the description.

I finally bought this game from the latest Steam summer sale and will try it out as one of the next games. I’m pretty interested actually because of the mixed reviews. Just to see how I feel about the things others didn’t like. I don’t always agree with the majority.

giom - 01 July 2015 02:28 PM

All of the springs are poisonous? - Yes
But if you drink for example from the first spring and then the second spring, you’ll be cured by the second spring and not poisoned? - Yes, that is the whole point.
Is there any plain water? - Yes
Would mixing two springs create plain water? So mixing both the lower spring (poison) and higher spring (antidote) - No, that is not possible.

Sounds like a fun puzzle - Yes

I can see you are thinking along the right path.

Iznogood - 01 July 2015 01:31 PM

So it seems that the deck is stacked against us, there is absolutely no way we can win, defeat the dragon and live to tell the tale - but there is, and the solution is actually quite simple!

I’ve played the Samaritan Paradox and remember this particular problem well. But you have not provided enough info to solve it.

Sefir - 01 July 2015 04:05 PM

EDIT: Screw this!!! I think I got it!!

Congratulations you have just unlocked the:
Dragon Slayer Achievement!

Though you should drink from the first spring, as you can’t be sure if the dragon brings you water from the 2nd or 3rd spring, and both will work as an antidote for the 1st spring. And the non-poisonous water you bring the dragon should be fresh water which you can also find on the island. But that is just minor details.

Iznogood - 01 July 2015 02:40 PM

Is there any plain water? - Yes

Aha! Then it’s easy.

[spoiler]The dragon will want to win, so will give you water from the second or third spring (so you can’t get an antidote). So you poison yourself with the first well before the challenge.
To win yourself, you offer the dragon plain water. It will think it’s poison from spring one or two, so it will go to spring three for the antidote, poisoning itself.[/spoiler]
You win.

Edit: I should refresh my pages more often.

Kurufinwe - 01 July 2015 04:46 PM

[spoiler]But if the dragon has three functioning brain cells, he’ll figure that out immediately and bring you water from the first spring. Or plain water. And then what do you do???[/spoiler] Either we’re missing some information, or the solution makes no sense.

Well [spoiler]the dragon isn’t that smart, or perhaps it is just so overconfident that it doesn’t even consider that there is a way that we can actually win this challenge - It really is a quite arrogant dragon - Either way we have to bet our life on what the dragon is most likely to do, even if there is a small chance it might do differently.
The dragon will (most likely) drink from the 3rd spring, believing that we have brought it water from the 1st or 2nd spring, and it will (most likely) give us water from either the 2nd or 3rd spring, knowing that we can’t reach the 3rd spring.[/spoiler]

No missing information and the solution makes perfect sense.

TimovieMan - 01 July 2015 04:46 PM

Edit: I should refresh my pages more often.

You still get a
Dragon Slayer Achievement!
though!

Kurufinwe - 01 July 2015 05:10 PM

So the solution is “you have to hope that the dragon is a complete moron.” That’s disappointing.

(If you want a riddle with dragons that actually makes complete logical sense, this one is pretty fantastic.)

Not a complete moron, just not able to see the flaws in its own logic, remember that it is the dragon herself that constructed this challenge, believing it to be an unbeatable challenge. If it was smart enough to see the flaw, it would have constructed a different challenge - It didn’t construct a different challenge, ergo it is not smart enough to see the flaw.

Besides, the riddle you linked to is even worse in that regard, as it requires that all the dragons use flawless logic, but if just one of the dragons failed at it’s PHD in logic, the whole solution comes tumbling down like a house of cards.

Kurufinwe - 01 July 2015 05:57 PM

but there’s no strategy that guarantees your survival.

Build up an immunity against the poison?

Or, you know, suspend your disbelief and just stick to the rules without thinking too hard about what else could happen.