Riddle me this.

[emjay]

Honestly, from the way the riddle is worded, only the first prisoner can get the correct answer because "Silence ensues, but after quite a while, one of the prisoners yells: I got it!"

If all were silent, how would the second and third prisons ever get hints about what the others could see?

I think that's the significance of the prolonged part of the silence... giving the others a chance to answer:

So the first guy can only answer if there's two white feathers in front of him. If that's not the case then he keeps quiet and the second guy gets a chance to answer. At this point there must be at least one black feather between him and the guy in front. If he sees a white feather in front of him then he must be the black and therefore can answer. But if he sees a black feather then he could be black or white, so he can't answer with certainty so he keeps quiet, giving the last guy a chance to speak, who, knowing that it's fell through to him and knowing the progression which would lead to that, can answer with certainty that his own feather is black.

The point being that all three of them can potentially answer black with certainty, with it falling through to the next guy in sequence if one cannot. Therefore all possible random distributions of feathers are covered.

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Jess won that one. I still worked it out meself by just working through it as I wrote that... because reading other people's logic is really hard for me... I tend to get lost in it but the gist was there in Jess' post and I presume we're saying the same thing