Three Logicians walk into a bar...
There's a logic puzzle that's been going around that has a bunch of my friends stumped. I don't know if it's really from a primary school assignment in Singapore (the syntax certainly reflects Singapore's mixed heritage), but I solved more complicated logic puzzles all the time in elementary school, so maybe
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I began reading the puzzle without the assumption that an answer was possible. Either because the article was about how this puzzle stumped a lot of adults, or because I've run into that problem a lot recently, I did not go in assuming there is sufficient data to come up with an answer (even if A & B do have enough information to come up with an answer).
Thus, because the timing of the 3 statements is ambiguous (they're NOT explicitly after C tells A & B - that COULD happen between statements 1 & 2), then there ARE multiple solutions to the problem.
In the case where statement 1 is made before C tells A the month, statement 1 has no information content. Then, statement 2 indicates that when C tells B what the day is, that is sufficient to identify the birthday (either the 18th or the 19th). Then, A, knowing the month and knowing that the date is either the 18th or the 19th, also knows the birthday. In which case, all 3 statements are true - and the person reading the puzzle still doesn't know if the answer is May 19 or June 18 (which were my original two possibilities, until I started reading answers stating that May & June were the first things to be eliminated).
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