yes/no logic problem

Question

*There is a Truth Teller (always tells the truth), a Liar (always lies), and an Occasional Liar (sometimes lies, and sometimes says the truth). Each of them knows who is who.

You may ask three 'yes or no' questions to determine who is who. Each time you ask a question, it must only be directed to one of them (of your choice). You may ask the same question more than once, but of course it will count towards your total. What are your questions and to whom will you ask them? ?*

In all honesty, I don't know where to start with this type of question. I'm really not looking for an answer, but guidance on how to approach a problem like this.

The condition that

"Each person knows who is who"

Seems to me to be the important part of this, and means I should start with trying to discover the occasional liar, but what I can't work out is the starting question I should ask.

So I then tried to ask each person if they're a liar, which caused me confusion because if I ask 'A' if he is the liar, and he says 'yes', then he is not the liar, as the liar would say 'no'; therefore, he is telling the truth.

But if he says 'no', then he could be telling the truth or a lie and doing this for the other outputs the same result, which confused me even more.

Is there a possibility someone could break this down a little, it would be much appreciated.

Also I am new here and not sure what tags I should tag, so sorry for the wrong input.

Answer 1

Here's a bit of guidance:

The person who answers randomly is a big problem, because you don't get any useful information from them. You may want to consider using your first question to single out one who does not speak randomly. After that, ask them about the identities of the other two, but make sure that you figure out if they tell the truth or not!

My solution (as OP requested in comments):

Question 1:

Pick one person at random and ask "If I were to ask the person who answered randomly if 2+2=4, what would they say?" The truth teller and the liar have no way to answer this, so will say something along the lines of "I don't know" or just not answer. The person who speaks randomly will give a random yes or no answer. If you don't get an answer, you are talking to someone who is NOT random, if you do get an answer, you are talking to someone who IS random.

Question 2:

Ask someone who is NOT random "Is 2+2 equal to 4?" On a yes, you are talking to a truth teller. If the answer is no, you are talking to the liar. If you already know the identity of the random person from question 1, you're done. Otherwise, go to Question 3...

Question 3:

Ask the person you've identified as a liar or truth teller, "Is the person to the left (or right) of you (the other one of truth teller or liar)? Then, based on the response, you'll know all 3 of their identities!

Answer 2

Assume you have them standing in front of you, with 1 to 2’s left and 2 to 3’s left. You can

First ask 1 if Sometimes stands to the right of the Liar. If YES, then 1 truth teller => order is TLS. 1 liar => order is LTS. 1 sometimes => order is either SLT or STL. Note that if YES, then person 2 is never the sometimes. If NO, then 1 truthteller => order is TSL. 1 list => order is LST. 1 sometimes => order is either SLT or STL. Note that person 3 is never the sometimes.

Then for the second question,

Ask 2 if answer 1 was YES, or ask 3 if answer 1 was NO. Ask: is there a truthteller in the lineup? Then obviously a YES means truthteller and a NO means liar. So: YES YES => order is LTS or STL. YES NO => order is TLS or SLT. NO YES => SLT or LST. NO NO => order is STL or TSL.

We then can lock down each combination.

YES YES => ask #2 (truthteller) if 1 is a liar. YES = LTS, NO = STL. YES NO => ask 2 (liar) if 1 is a truthteller. YES = SLT, NO = TLS. NO YES => ask 3 (truthteller) if 1 is a liar. YES = LST, NO = SLT. NO NO => ask 3 (liar) if 1 is a truthteller. YES = STL, NO = TSL.