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betterthanwell comments on The self-fooling problem. - Less Wrong Discussion
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This was the first approach I thought of. Make a haystack for the needle.
This will however allow you to find the haystack.
"Where is the coin? Right here, in the pile of coins."
Your coin finding self could beat your coin hiding self by scooping up all the coins,
bringing them before a judge and arbiter and saying "here it is."
You will likely have found the coin, even if you can not identify it.
If a judge can easily identify the coin, and you have found and presented the coin to the judge,
then it would be reasonable to say the coin is found.
Otherwise, the answer is lost to both the judge and the coin hider, much as if you ground it to a fine dust.
Save yourself the trouble and grind the coin into dust.
Destroy the answer. Make retrieval impossible.
(This was probably intended to be forbidden in the formulation of the problem, but it is not.)
In that case, lock away the coin and hide the key among thousands of identical keys. Surely a wheelbarrow full of keys would not constitute a coin.
And if identifying the locked chamber (or container, or whatever) counts as finding the coin, then lock a bunch of them after hiding the coin in a randomly selected one.
Trivial solutions for the problem: (Coin hider to wins over the coin finder.)
The first makes the coin lose it's uniqueness, the second makes the coin physically irretrievable.
No reason to play by implied rules, rules that only a human would think to follow anyway.