I'm sure I have some confirmation bias. The incidences that I spoke of are rare, but do occur. Perhaps it is all in my head and I only dreamed of them.

You may have had a correct piece of intuition though.

Of course not if you "felt" which card would be dealt next (if the cards weren't marked), but possibly when "feeling" what somebody would do.

To nitpick a little, this problem seems to fail if the dragons have perceptively different shades of green eyes like light green, medium green, dark green, bluish green etc. Then all the dragons would still have nominally green eyes, but at the same time they would all look somewhat different from one another. After being told "at least one of you has green eyes", the dragons would be pretty confused.

Something is still not making sense. If what you tell the dragons is "at least one of you has green eyes" then the inner monologue for each one of them will be "I am observing 99 dragons with green eyes. That's definitely at least one! Just like the visitor said. There's no need to think that I myself have green eyes. I guess I'm the luckiest dragon around, I'm the only one without green eyes!"

And then the next day, when none of them have turned into sparrows, they would think, "Well of course not, because every OTHER dragon is observing 98 green eyed dragons, and me, the one dragon without green eyes. So what they each observe is fulfilling the requirement of the 'at least one dragon with green eyes'."

So iow, the dragons won't realize by observing the other green eyed dragons why they themselves should have green eyes, nor is other dragons not turning into sparrows indicative that they must have green eyes, since all other dragons are observing many other dragons with green eyes.

What am I missing here?

Work through easier to understand cases first. Try it with two dragons, then three, then four, etc.

You just state in initial problem that all the dragons have uniform green eyes, even though it is a natural assumption I would think.

Also, all the 100 dragons have to interact perfectly with each other for the entire 100 days. But they are "infallibly logical" so we must assume that will occur.

You can nitpick that even though there are no mirrors on the island dragons need to drink and they would see their reflections in ponds, pools, rivers etc. and may drink in groups. They never talk of eye color but each can individually think about eye color, they have to in order for the problem to work correctly.

I have blue eyes.

Interesting, but the old noggin got this one incorrect. Each dragon would be able to independently figure out that it has 99 days to come up with a solution to the real problem, which is to avoid finding out if it has green eyes on day 100.

Excellent. Dragons all hide on the 99th day. Hmm, but they would find out eventually when they came out. What if they hid for all 99 days?

I was thinking more on the lines of heavy drinking, or thinking about baseball.

What happens if one of them decides to take one for the team and turn into a sparrow on the first night? Does that disrupt the timing in anyway?

I don't think that was a choice...

Yes, nicely done you old codger. If you don't wish to become a long-tailed sparrow. Maybe long-tailed sparrows have better lives than dragons? After all, as a long-tailed sparrow you get to fly about and S*** on anything you want to.

One of the dragons starts running very fast while the others are sleeping in order for red shift to take place and mess up the logic! The others know there is a problem but they dont know his speed and they cant decide what color it started from anyway! Then another dragon proposes (the others dont have to listen to him, so no spoken communication takes place, because they all propose it to themselves anyway independently) to use the passage of the day (as clock) and the changing in the parallax of the dragon to figure his speed...But now the dragon that is moving away who has no timing device cant find the relative speed of the other dragons that appear red shifted to him too. So the trick is to leave at night before the others wake up, take no clock with you on purpose, and reach 0.99c speed! There is a problem though if the others have memory and know that guy was green initially. That is the problem if they start from a state that at 0 day they already each know that all others are green (which they cant generalize though to everyone sees green because they dont know their own and cant talk).

So thorough MdZ, haha!

Then another Dragon that is a Biologist/Dragonologist thinks of using other skin color properties to figure the speed by comparison. Damn!

Oh but then brilliantly the first Dragon recognizes that it is not only important to accelerate to very high speed but to also keep accelerating so that a horizon will form and he will be unable to receive information from the waking up time of the dragons (ie unable to ever see them walking around from very far and deduce all these things).

So there you have it before they all wake up leave and accelerate forever (with proper pace etc). But now the problem is that all of them have to decide which one will be the one that will go for it. So they all decide to leave in different directions! And now there is only a finite small probability that they all selected randomly such directions that the problem can still be solved! It has become also a probability problem! Unless they can figure out to randomize their directions and accelerations in such a way that its not possible to get in trouble by ever being forced to learn these things by the reality of their choices!

And so we arrive one more time at;
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Non free will signature. 2+2 community, BruceZ, 2+2 leaders etc, all with your choices give back BruceZ and others you "chase" away to this discussion and the ones that will follow. We are all in this interactions learning game together.

No word problem puts Brian in a box.

I'm a bit disturbed that these dragons are supposed to be smart and lasted through their first 100 days. Presumably each must believe that the other dragons cannot see what color their eyes are. The problem goes poof as none were given any new information leading requiring the others to know what color eyes you have.

Also, it is a "rule" that they have to turn into a long-tailed sparrow?!? It is a rule on some islands that you have to lift the toilet seat before you pee. Who, exactly, is enforcing this rule? The toilet-seat lifting rule is more sensible and still can be broken. Even if it is the other dragons enforcing it, you just wait until a minute after midnight on the 100th day and all have a good laugh. Given your lots answers to the problem, I expect that I'd be the only remaining dragon, with the problem of what to do with 99 long-tailed sparrows.

Worse comes to worse, you just split up and go your separate ways. WFT sort of dragon wants to spend all of their time on an island with 99 other dragons?

Correction: 99 other sexy dragons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonslayers

If someone tried to set me up on a blind date, the phrase "sexy dragon" is going to carry a lot less weight than "swallows."

Oh, "sparrows." That isn't really helpful.

Halalalala!

There you go, spontaneous dragonslayer effect catalyzed by logical tunneling.

It relates to poker and many many other situations in human psychology. Very often it is the ability to keep up the pretense that only one person knows is what keeps a situation stable. And it goes several layers deep sometimes. I know that you did X. I also know that you know. But as long as you dont know that I know that you know, we can maintain status quo. Once that barrier is breached, equilibrium is disrupted.

For some reason I'm struggling to come up with crisp concrete examples right now

I'm thinking more along the lines of a heavy baseball bat.

http://www.snpp.com/episodes/9F16.html

Lisa: Look, there's only one way to settle this. Rock-paper-scissors.
Lisa's brain: Poor predictable Bart. Always takes `rock'.
Bart's brain: Good ol' `rock'. Nuthin' beats that!
Bart: Rock!
Lisa: Paper.
Bart: D'oh!