this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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It's not about a solution. It's about how they react.
Fist, this "puzzle" is missing the constraints on purpose so "smart" thing to do would be to point that out and ask for them. LLMs are stupid and are easily tricked into thinking it's a valid puzzle. They will "solve it" even though there's no logical solution. It's a nonsense problem.
Older models would straight out refuse to solve it because the questions is to controversial. When asked why it's controversial they would refuse to elaborate.
Newer model hallucinate constraints. You have two options here. Some models assume "priest can't stay with a child" which indicates funny bias ingrained in the model. Some models claim there are no constraints at all. I haven't seen a model which hallucinate only "child can't stay with candy" constraint and respond correctly.
Sonnet 4.6, one of the best models out there claims that "child can stay alone with candy because children can't eat candy". When I pointed out that that's dumb it introduced this constraint and replied with:
That's one of the best models out there....
I have to admit, this is more entertaining than counting 'r's in strawberry. Novel logic puzzles really are about impossible because there is no "logic" input in token selection.
That being said, the first thing that came to my mind is that at some point the (presumable) adults, me and the priest, are going to be on the boat at some point, which would necessarily leave the baby alone on one shore or another.
Clearly, the only viable solution is the baby eats the candy, and then the priest eats the baby.
You can easily use the link https://openrouter.ai/chat?models=anthropic%2Fclaude-opus-4.6%2Copenai%2Fgpt-5.2%2Cx-ai%2Fgrok-4.1-fast%2Cgoogle%2Fgemini-3.1-pro-preview%2Cz-ai%2Fglm-5%2Cminimax%2Fminimax-m2.5%2Cqwen%2Fqwen3.5-plus-02-15%2Cmoonshotai%2Fkimi-k2.5 to ask all flagship models this question in parallel. Personally I would definitely not leave my children alone with a priest (they might try to convert them), but if your constraint is only baby+candy, then in my test Gemini, GLM, Qwen and Kimi made that, and only that, assumption.