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printing-spoon comments on The self-fooling problem. - Less Wrong Discussion
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Yes. You need to weight locations according to the time it takes to search them and then make a random selection from that weighted set; that'll give you longer search times on average than an unweighted random pick from a large set where most of the elements take a trivially small time to search. I could take a stab at proving that mathematically, if you're comfortable with some abstraction.
You can beat even that by cleverly exploiting features of the setup, as I and muflax did in our responses to the OP, but that's admittedly not quite in keeping with the spirit of the problem.
I see your point. A reduction of easily searched places will indeed make it more difficult for B to find the coin, even though B will have a smaller space to search. The question that remains is: given a mathematical description of the search/hide-space what probability distribution over locations (randomization process) will minimize the probability of B finding the coin.