I'm experimenting with Claude Code animation. I had it animate my answer to this riddle.

This is a great video, but I disagree with the answer, at least on a technicality and as a matter of practical interpretation. I do not think it is rational for a perfectly rational being to assume perfectly rational behavior from everyone else. The riddle says all lions are rational, but it never establishes that the lions have common knowledge of each other’s rationality. Without that, and given the enormous downside of dying compared to the small benefit of eating the meat, a rational lion would never take the risk, because doing so means relying on the rational behavior of others. In a roundabout way, this riddle reminds me of St. Anselm’s ontological argument for God. God is the greatest thing that can be conceived. A real version of something is greater than an imaginary version. Therefore, God is real. The argument only holds up if you stay in the theoretical. To clarify, St. Anselm's argument is correct in one sense: a theoretically real God is greater than a theoretically imaginary one. The problem is that neither version ever leaves the realm of theory. The lion riddle works the same way. The answer is only “eat the meat” if you never leave the theory. Once you move from theory to real world application, the answer is always no.

I actually thought about having a twist ending. When I first recorded the riddle I incorrectly said "254 lions" (which would make it unsafe) and I thought about recording the twist where the lion decides it's safe to eat, but then miscounted, and gets eaten. I wound up not going that route, but yes, I agree in reality it would be smarter not to eat as you can't guarantee that everyone else is rational (or counts correctly) or that no new lions arrive, etc.

Problem is a bit ill-posed. A lion is much bigger than a steak, more than one lion could feed on a sleeping lion at the same time. And perfectly rational lions should be able to coordinate.

I think this is flawed. The rational lion will always eat. Whether the total is even or odd, if the 1st Lion decides to eat, the 2nd won't eat since it will die as well, only if the count is 2 Lions total will it eat.

A lion will eat the steak because they don't have the concept of it being poisoned. These are just regular lions, right? They're not intelligent as a human?

A regular lion, sure. But these are logical lions.

Funny vid. I hate this type of question though, because even a perfectly rational/logical being cannot override primitive biological imperatives. And if I was given that question I would be sitting there thinking about the dynamics of animals.

Wouldn't everything over 3 be safe because the lion who will eat you will always get eaten by the next lion so no one will eat you?

This assumes the lions take turns. But given that the lions are perfectly logical, one lion cannot eat an entire second lion. Therefore, it would not be safe for the first lion to eat the meat.

This is retarded

love using a riddle answer as the test. did it pace the reveal on its own or did you have to give it timings

I wrote out my solution, then recorded it, and asked it to match the animation to my explanation.

for a riddle explainer id try manim instead of blender, claude writes it fine and it renders in like a minute not 2 hours

love these. been doing small visual experiments in claude too, the fact that you can just describe motion and get it is still wild to me

pretty sure lions don't eat other lions just bc they fall asleep especially if they're logical lions

same idea worked for my music player's launch video: fable 5.2 wrote code that drives the real app and renders it frame by frame. what are you rendering with?

Three.js or did it drive Blender for this? The arena from above with the ring lights looks great 🙂

This was Blender. My instructions were just "Download and use Blender". I have never used Blender before, but I saw tweets from other people who had.

Wait wtf I don't get why it alternates. Anything after 3 lions would not be safe?

Nice use case. What did Claude Code render it with – Manim, Remotion or plain canvas? Curious which one holds up best for 3-minute explainers like this.

Thanks. My only instructions to it as far as animation tools were to "download and use Blender"

Amazing I am not sure how many times I watched it now 😝

Curious which library it reached for to animate the riddle

what did claude render this with, blender scripts or three.js? 3 minutes of 3d timed to a voice track usually takes a lot of manual nudging on the timestamps

how long did claude take to make this? and did you use blender mcp or Higgs field?

I used Blender. I just told Claude to download and use Blender without mentioning MCP at all. Most of the time was rendering. I'm using an M1 Mac Mini. It took about two hours to render it.

i want someone to simulate this with 253 different AIs to see what they do

A logical lion would still have a lions intelligence. They are going to eat it

Claude animating lions is wild

No no no. Hogwash. So, only 1 lion can eat steak, which means only 1 lion is gonna be happy. It’s stipulated that these are perfectly rational lions. So, you’re telling me one is gonna roll the dice and now have 252 lions pissed and hungry likely waiting to seek revenge after? Nah. No one’s eating the steak.

That Claude Code animation is pure wizardry. It brings life to static text—brilliant for engagement! But here's the real magic: It's all about the content that compels, not just the cool tech.

Logically, some steak is better than no steak. Every lion would try to eat the steak if they did not know it was poisoned. Lions fight, even logical ones. If they knew it was poisoned, every lion would eat an equal sized piece of the steak, for self evident logical reasons.

What if the poisoned lion can be eaten by multiple other logical lions? I don’t think the original specifies that 1 sleeping lion is fully consumed by 1 awake lion.

does the meat confer any benefit or is it as meaningless as including a lion to represent a logical actor? this riddle is so incredibly dumb it will make you a casuist

Wow very cool use of Claude and a good riddle as well

They’re lions. They’ll eat the steak, but not each other

Please do more

How is the first lion "rational and want to survive" in the 3 lions state?

The whole prompt was 'download and use Blender' and you'd never opened it. Love that.

I hate this answer because it has a huge presumption that the lions are going to eat sequentially and analyze in sequence. I presume that’s what’s meant by “logical” but like many riddles it doesn’t really establish the rules very well.

Watching geniuenly good AI entertainment for the first time.