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Miscellaneous

  • History of the Muddy Children Puzzle

    The Muddy Children Puzzle is a puzzle about knowledge and ignorance that has been inspiring for the development of epistemic logic. Who came up with it first? This is unclear. In 'History of the Muddy Children Puzzle', Hans traces the origin of the Muddy Children Puzzle through logical and literary publications over the past two centuries. The earliest source is early 19th century France (barbichette, pince-sans-rire), travelling by way of Germany (19th century), Japan (1941, Dirac's riddle), USA (1942, Kraitchik), England (1953, Littlewood). From the 1950s onward it is everywhere, and of course very present in 'Reasoning about Knowledge' by Fagin, Halpern, Vardi and Moses.

    Hans is very interested in novel information on historical sources from before 1950. Since posting it, he already obtained: a translation of a relevant part from a 1941 Japanese detective novel by Takataro Kigi, and a publication by Jacques Lacan from 1949 starting a parallel history of muddy children in psychoanalysis. A persistent rumour connects a young Alonzo Church to the riddle in the 1930s. He could not confirm it, despite detailed search in the Church Archive. Any further information, from any source and in any language (or script) will be appreciated.

    For more information, see https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.13703 or contact Hans van Ditmarsch at .

  • Marieke Schouwstra wins an NWO Open Competition L

    The ILLC's Marieke Schouwstra and Eva van Lier (UvA/ACLC) have won the NWO Open Competition for their project You won the lottery… NOT! Evolution, comprehension and structure of languages with late negation. Read the abstract below.

    'Every human language employs a "negator" to express that something is not the case. Most languages place this negator before the verb; placing it afterward is relatively rare. Linguists theorize that negator-after-verb  is uncommon because it forces the brain to reinterpret a sentence’s meaning upon hearing the negator, though scientific proof for this claim is lacking. This project investigates late-negation languages using various methods, such as brain scanning of speakers of Cha’palaa, a late-negation language of Ecuador, and studying artificial language learning. By analyzing how humans process late negation, researchers aim to determine how cognition shapes language structure.'

    For more information, see https://www.nwo.nl/en/researchprogrammes/open-competition-ssh/granted-projects.

  • Qian Chen received the Best Poster Award at CACML 2026

    Qian Chen, a PhD candidate at the ILLC–Tsinghua Joint Research Center, received the Best Poster Award at the Chinese Annual Conference on Mathematical Logic 2026.

    For more information, see https://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/info/1175/126672.htm or contact Nick Bezhanishvili at .

  • ESSLLI 2026 - Second Call for Participation (Early-bird extension)

    The European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) is a yearly recurring event, organized under the auspices of the Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI), and has been running since 1989. The ESSLLI Summer School provides an interdisciplinary setting in which courses and workshops are offered in logic, linguistics and computer science, also from wider scientific, historical, and philosophical perspectives.

    Registration: The early-bird registration deadline has been extended to June 15th

    For more information, see https://2026.esslli.eu/registration/registration.html or contact Dušan Variš at .