this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2026
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Couldn't you argue that 0% is correct?
It's a paradox, no of the answers can be correct, so the chance that you pick the correct one is 0%.
Sure, by picking it, it makes it wrong, but you don't care about that.
If you ran a infite monte carlo test on it, you'd end up with 0% correct answers.
Nah it's a paradox. There's no such thing as just a freestanding Monte Carlo test that you can just "run" - you do actually need to define enough parameters to make it tell you anything.
This kind of self-referential stuff feels like a proof of Gödel's incompleteness theorems with extra steps.
The trick is that there is no paradox, only the implication of one. 'If' being the key word - you're not actually being asked to answer randomly, but you are being subtly trolled.
You do not need to pick at all for the paradox to exist. If either A or D is correct, the other is also correct, and the random odds of selecting the correct answer should have been 50%. This is a contradiction. Neither A nor D can be the correct answer.
If B is correct, the random odds of selecting it is only 25% - a contradiction, so B cannot be correct. Likewise, if C is correct, there is a 25% chance of randomly picking C. C is also not correct.
None of the four answers is correct, so there is a 0% chance of randomly picking the correct answer. C is correct, contradiction, C is not correct, C is correct, is not, is too, etc.
The paradox is resolved by knowing the the scantron answer key has A selected. D is not sufficiently identical to A in javascript, so only the students that randomly guessed the correct answer will get credit.
Because the paradox can only be resolved with either A or D as the selected answer, well informed students picking randomly would have a 50% success rate.
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C; the question has two identical answers, it gets removed from the test based on that error
A crocodile has your toddler. It says it will return your child if you can guess its next move. What do you say?
"Holy fuck a talking crocodile‽"
Oof. Wrong time to get excited, buddy...
"It's your responsibility now you scaly sucker!" and then voom off on my dune buggy. Also in this scenario I have a dune buggy for reasons.
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Lmao that's fucked up hahaha
It's B - 50%; either correct (50%) or false (50%), binary 0/1, yes/no, score or not.
There is no correct answer. The reason why there's no correct answer is that it's a self-referential paradox, but imagine of you saw this:
What is 1+1?
A) 9
B) π
C) 76
D) Syria
There's no correct answer, so it's not a valid multiple choice question.
Does anyone else smell pancakes?
Yeah, that's me. They're ready.
So of your four pancakes, if you randomly ate one, but two of them looked the same...
I would answer C) 0% - Ultimately I feel this isn't a "pick the correct answer" type of test and more of a "pick the best answer" type of test.
My reasoning is there are really two questions - one is being answered at random, the other I am answering. The one being answered at random is making any answer it chooses wrong - If it picks A or D (25%), then the correct answer is B (50%). If it picks B (50%), then the answer is either A or D (25%). If it chooses C (0%) then the correct answer is A or D (25%) again. No matter which one is chosen at random, it becomes wrong as soon as it is chosen. So then back to the question on the test that I am answering, the correct answer is C) 0%.
Also, if the teacher marks that wrong, then I am even more correct.
You can’t separate the question like that. Whichever answer you circle indicates your assertion that this is the probability of getting the correct answer by uniform random chance.
This means that any answer you circle is wrong, and so the correct answer is to not circle any of them. You could even write e) none of the above to indicate that you have deliberately chosen not to circle one of them instead of skipping the question.
I have had plenty of exams with multiple choice questions that included the possibility of no correct answers, one correct answer, or even multiple correct answers, and we were expected to make that judgement (rather than blindly follow instructions).
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It’s definitely B ) 50%. Ignoring the values for answers, there can only be 1 “correct” answer. If you have 4 options and 1 can be correct, a random guess is 25%. Since there are 2 options for 25%, you have a 50% chance of guessing the correct 25%.
Yes but then 50% would not be the correct answer.
I fucking hate this game 😭
But then the correct answer is b)50%, so the chances or picking that are 25%, my brain hurts now.
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Can't be 25% = it could be correct if the "other 25%" was 24 or 26 (or even 25.000001). Since there are two 25%, the 25% change is raised, nullify the 25% prediction. Can't be 50%, because there are other two different options in addition to fifty in fifty-fifty; so 50% (or fifty-fifty) don't exist as option.
Can't be 0%, because 0% is a very specific assertion that can't ever be true due to paradox (if you "guessed", you nailed it 100%)
Result: malformed question, no one is valid... The best you can have is 25%, which is still wrong, but I thing is the closer to approximate. Ideally the question would reform as:
Option A: 25% Option B: 50% Option C: 0%
=33.3~%
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C: 50%, you have a 1 in 4 (25%) chance of guess the correct answer but there are two correct answers so 2 in 4 = 50%.
I would answer 0%.
You say the answer is 50%. So 25% is not the right answer to the question, right? So you only have 25% chance of randomly selecting 50%, and therefore, 50% is the wrong answer.
So the answer is 25%, but you have 50% chance of picking 25%, so it's wrong again.
You can't solve it: the answer is 0%.
But that would mean 0% is the correct answer.
So theres a 25% chance of picking 0% as the correct answer.
The correct answer changes depending on what answer you picked.
Its a Schrodingers probability question.
If 0% is not the right answer, that confirms that no matter what you pick at random, this is not the right answer: your chances of picking it are 0.
As much as you can loop to demonstrate the other answers are all wrong, you demonstrate 0 is the correct answer by a loop also.
You didn't follow what that means though. If 0% is the correct answer, a random guess has a 25% chance of hitting it. It loops.
Therefore 0 is not the right answer, and your chances of picking the right answer are 0.
It also loops, positively this time.
add a e) 20%
Here's a more fun one:
If you pick an answer to this question at random, what is the chance that you will be correct? Mark at least one of the applicable options.
(a) 20%
(b) 6.25%
(c) 0%
(d) 20%
And as another puzzle, what happens if you swap "at least one of the" for "all"?
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