Knights, Knaves, Klingons, and Elves

Knights and Knaves is a puzzle invented by the logician Raymond Smullyan. The premise is simple: in the land of knights and knaves, knights speak only the truth, and knaves tell only lies. There are many variations on this puzzle, and it's a motif throughout Sweet Reason, the book I'm working on this summer. Here's an example of a knights and knaves puzzle: You come to a crossroads and see two people standing there. For some reason, you know that one is a knight and the other is a knave, but you don't know which is which. Can you, by asking one question, determine which road to take?

I'll pause while you think about it.

One solution is to ask either person, "If I asked this other guy which road to take, which one would he say?" Then you take the other one.

An important feature of this puzzle is that no one ever says he's a knave. A knight won't say it because it isn't true, and a knave won't say it because it is. This being the case, if someone says, "I'm a kgiagha," you know that he's claiming to be a knight.

Jim thought it would be a good idea to include a puzzle like that, using nonsense words. Except he didn't want nonsense words, he wanted Klingon and Elvish. In their special typefaces. This project took three people most of the morning.

Naturally, someone has figured out a way to use Klingon and Elvish script within a LaTeX environment. What's not so easy is figuring out how they did it. I kept telling Jim I could just do it as a picture, but it was important to him that we not do it that way. Finally, after a multitude of error messages, we gave up. Behold the Klingon term "de 'ngeb," meaning something along the lines of "untrue statement"



...and the Elvish "ilanwe quettar," which means something like "false speech."