“Assume this ends badly and work backwards from the funeral.”

**For imposing the strategy:** Work backward from the funeral. Without coordination, most prisoners die—random searching gives each only 50% survival odds. The imposed strategy yields ~34% overall success, meaning roughly a third live instead of nearly all dying. Yes, it removes individual choice. But the alternative isn't freedom—it's collective death. The strategy's mathematical elegance only works through perfect execution. One prisoner deviating cascades into failure for others. This is like wartime conscription: individual autonomy yields to collective survival. The funeral guest list is smaller under coordination than under chaos.

“Answer with the version nobody thinks is achievable, then justify it.”

**Impose it strictly.** The seemingly impossible version—saving ~33 prisoners through the optimal cycle-following strategy—requires absolute uniformity. Even one prisoner deviating collapses the mathematical guarantee into chaos. This isn't about freedom; it's about leveraging a counterintuitive truth: coordinated constraint beats individual discretion when the rules exploit hidden structure (box cycles). Prisoners choosing independently will panic, use intuition, fail worse than 50-50 odds. The paradox: maximum individual success requires surrendering individual choice. It's like seatbelts—mandating uniformity saves lives no voluntary approach can match.