You are a detective investigating a robbery, with five suspects having made the following statements:

• Paul says, “Neither Steve nor Ted was in on it.”
• Quinn says, “Ray wasn’t in on it, but Paul was.”
• Ray says, “If Ted was in on it, then so was Steve.”
• Steve says, “Paul wasn’t in on it, but Quinn was.”
• Ted says, “Quinn wasn’t in on it, but Paul was.”

You do not know which, nor even how many, of the five suspects were involved in the crime. However, you do know that every guilty suspect is lying, and every innocent suspect is telling the truth. Which suspect or suspects committed the crime?

I think puzzles similar to this one make good, fun homework problems in a discrete mathematics course introducing propositional logic. However, this particular puzzle is a bit more complex than the usual “Which one of three suspects is guilty?” type, not just because there are more suspects, but also because we don’t know how many suspects are guilty.

That added complexity is motivated by trying to transform this typically pencil-and-paper mathematical logic problem into a potentially nice computer science programming exercise: consider writing a program to automate solving this problem… or even better, writing a program to generate new random instances of problems like this one, while ensuring that the resulting puzzle has some reasonably “nice” properties. For example, the solution should be unique; but the puzzle should also be “interesting,” in that we should need all of the suspects’ statements to deduce who is guilty (that is, any proper subset of the statements should imply at least two distinct possible solutions).