It is a bit distracting to place a theoretical problem in an unnecessarily morbid context. We don't have to be dark to be cool. How about a "cheerleader coordination problem" or the "Sing Happy Birthday problem"?
If you're a computer scientist/engineer, and the first thought that goes through your mind when you read the description of a problem is "wow, that's offensive" or "wow, why describe the problem like that"....
How does the context of the problem statement have any bearing on a solution? outside of certain moral dilemmas in extreme instances, they don't.
Who cares if the problem was framed in a "morbid context"? it's done, it's over, how does quibbling over the "context" solve anything? It doesn't. It's a complete waste of time and energy, and solutions are hard enough to come by for easy problems, let alone difficult ones, we should be expending our energy on solutions, not whining about terminology, or context.
I guess you could go back to 1957 and lecture John Myhill on this, or we could all just ignore the academic priority and rename the problem as you like and after you. For some problems with obvious racist or sexist "jokes" we do need to rename (and the original "jokesters" don't really deserve or respect for their original naming). But is this one really such a problem?
"It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter." (don't know the source of the quote)
In fact, "sing happy birthday problem" sounds offensive to me -- this is an incredibly stupid and annoying song. No reason to promote it. Sure firing squad is about killing people, but we already have laws regulating that and in most countries you won't see a sudden mob of gunmen lynching somebody in public places. I have seen no laws about subjecting innocent bystanders in say a restaurant to this horrible "song". I don't even mention the the main victim, who has to sit there with strained smile and suffer through that atrocious repetitive and dumb "singing"...
The jarring context may serve valid instructional purposes:
The vividness improves memorability.
Discarding colorful but logically-inessential details from a problem description is a useful skill that can benefit from practice.
The portrayal of life-or-death stakes draws interest by making the solution seem more urgent, and helpfully alludes to the real stakes, in commercial or military engineering, that are faced by those who are adept at such work.
But the context captures the importance of the problem to computer science clear. Singing happy birthday in unison is not a particularly important problem :)
The psychology of people on a firing squad is a real problem. To address this in real life, usually there is a "blank" round randomly placed into one of the guns. This tiny probability helps them, because they can tell themselves that maybe they didn't really participate in the killing. But they all have to fire at once, otherwise whoever fires first will be more worried that they fired the killing shot.
