On a faraway island there was a kingdom in which the inhabitants had either blue eyes or brown eyes. It was a small island, with the property that with every passing day, everyone on the island saw everyone else. However, there were no mirrors or anything else that reflected, so no one knew the color of his or her own eyes. One day the king decreed the following:
- At least one of you has blue eyes, and
- if you wake up in the morning and realize you have blue eyes, you must leave the island at once, without letting anyone see you.
It turns out there were precisely ten people on the island with blue eyes. Given that everyone on the island was capable of perfect logical reasoning and that everybody on the island knew about the logical abilities of their fellow islanders, what do you suppose happened to them following the king's decree?
From Derrick Niederman's Hard-to-Solve Math Puzzles.
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