Today’s puzzle concerns contestants in a fictitious game show trying to win £1m. It was also once given to a different sort of contestant competing for a different sort of prize: candidates applying to study joint philosophy degrees at Oxford university.
The teenagers were hoping to study PPE (politics, philosophy and economics), Maths and Philosophy, and Computer Science and Philosophy. They were set the puzzle in their admissions interviews, as part of a back-and-forth discussion in which the interviewer may have given hints and asked probing questions. The interviewer was focussed on how the candidates went about solving the puzzle as much as the solutions they gave.
