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Recently there were questions [1, 2] discussing the possibility of having a tag. The main criticism about it is that the same question could be asked for a group of islanders, lab rats, etc.. What these questions have in common is that multiple individuals have to agree on a strategy to reach a common target. Hence, I propose the tag . An alternative name for this category could be (with a slightly different meaning).

The tag description would be something like

A puzzle about finding a strategy involving several individuals cooperating to achieve a common aim. Examples are prisoners trying to avoid an execution, a group of people trying to guess the colors of their hats, or a magician and his assistants.

The tag would be a bit more specific than just because strategy also tags questions where a single person has all the information and optimizes the strategy on this.
On the other hand, the tag would encorporate all questions and a part of questions, like this one.

The use of such a tag is of course an easy search for people interested in "$A$ knows that $B$ knows that $C$ knows..." questions. But besides from that I can also imagine that for example a RPG gamemaster will have fun making his group solve one of these puzzles "live".

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  • $\begingroup$ This would just be an answer to my question [1] with the suggestion of "cooperation-game", no? $\endgroup$
    – Deusovi Mod
    Jan 22, 2018 at 2:08
  • $\begingroup$ @Deusovi Yes, it could as well be an answer to your question [1], but I already posted this as an answer to boboquack's question [2] and he suggested to make a new question out of it, so here we are. $\endgroup$
    – A. P.
    Jan 22, 2018 at 7:21
  • $\begingroup$ I don't think he was aware of my question at the time. That's likely why he suggested a new one. $\endgroup$
    – Deusovi Mod
    Jan 22, 2018 at 7:23
  • $\begingroup$ But he even referred to your question in his post. $\endgroup$
    – A. P.
    Jan 22, 2018 at 7:23
  • $\begingroup$ ...Huh, so he did. Well, I don't know how it's different, then. $\endgroup$
    – Deusovi Mod
    Jan 22, 2018 at 7:24
  • $\begingroup$ I've hopefully captured the essence of the discussion points here in the various new answers to the original Tag for prisoner puzzles? question - please comment on and/or vote for one of the answers there, or add your own answer if desired. $\endgroup$
    – Rubio Mod
    Jan 24, 2018 at 20:00

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I think that, for the sake of simplicity, it'd be easier to just generalize those types of puzzles into the tag rather than make them broader. I see we have tags such as , or , which could also have been generalized into their core components, but considering they have a generally more well-known type of structure (in your case, the prisoners scenario is more common than the islanders), it makes searching for similar puzzles an easier task. I find it easier to go looking for "prisoners" rather than "cooperation" when searching for such puzzles, as it is more common to meet puzzles that present themselves with the "prisoners" theme.

With that said, it could perhaps feel a bit awkward to have in a game that mentions lab-rats, as your example provided. Perhaps having both tags would be beneficial in that we could have more specific searches, while also encompassing the broader puzzle structure of "who knows what".

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  • $\begingroup$ I've hopefully captured the essence of the discussion points here in the various new answers to the original Tag for prisoner puzzles? question - please comment on and/or vote for one of the answers there, or add your own answer if desired. $\endgroup$
    – Rubio Mod
    Jan 24, 2018 at 20:01

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