Enough with the mental push-ups. Time for a mental marathon.
The legend on this next riddle is that Albert Einstein formulated it in the late 1800s and made the brash claim that 98 percent of the world's population could not solve it.
My hunch is that a large component of the 2 percent who can solve it read The Dawn Treader.
Now, stretch out thoroughly. I don't want anyone pulling any mental muscles. Warning, it will take some time and a sound strategy to solve. There really is a solution, btw. No tricks. And don't use Google to cheat either. We already covered why it was wrong to cheat earlier on the DT.
- In a street there are five houses, painted five different colors.
- In each house lives a person of different nationality
- These five homeowners each drink a different kind of beverage, smoke different brand of cigar and keep a different pet.
Einstein's riddle is: Who owns the fish?
Necessary clues:
1. The British man lives in a red house.
2. The Swedish man keeps dogs as pets.
3. The Danish man drinks tea.
4. The Green house is next to, and on the left of the White house.
5. The owner of the Green house drinks coffee.
6. The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds.
7. The owner of the Yellow house smokes Dunhill.
8. The man living in the center house drinks milk.
9. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
10. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
11. The man who keeps horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
12. The man who smokes Blue Master drinks beer.
13. The German smokes Prince.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The Blends smoker lives next to the one who drinks water.
The German. And to hark back to an earlier thread, I didn't cheat (assuming I'm right for a second!), and I haven't seen this puzzle before, but my mother used to do 'logic grid' puzzles which are the easiest way to manage the data in this problem, so as a good IT person I built a spreadsheet! So you might say I read the Cliff Notes 25 years ago :)
Oh, and in googling what the logic grid puzzles are called I found this problem spelled out, but with enough of the variables changed that it doesn't tell me if my answer is right or wrong :)
Posted by: Paul | September 21, 2007 at 09:59
Ok....this is like the LSAT but much worse. I spent about 15-20 minutes this morning on it. I haven't solved it all yet, but I don't know if I need to...the question is about the fish. I think the Norwegian, who lives in the yellow house on the far left and smokes Dunhills, owns the fish. But I also guessed 19 minutes to the canoe game...so....
Posted by: Mark | September 21, 2007 at 10:24
And I checked my answer to see that rushing through the question, in fact, gave me the same results that many of my LSAT answers gave me...the WRONG answer..hahaha. This was great. And I won't feel bad being included with the 'other' 98%! :-) I became stumped at ... "The Danish man drinks tea" and found that clue to be the toughest.
Posted by: Mark | September 21, 2007 at 10:32
The German owns Fish (while smoking Prince and drinking coffee in house number four which is painted green).
I ran through a few methods of accomplishing this upon first setting out. It was clear from the hints that I needed to use a process of elimination, but I wasn't sure how to keep track of it all at first. Finally I set up a table with 5 columns (1 representing each house) and 6 rows (House-Number, Nationality, House-Color, Pet, Beverage, and Cigar). I then filled each table cell with all 5 options which corresponded to the row it was in, except for House-Number which I set as 1-5 left to right. From there I ran through the hints taking into account the implications of each and removing items from cells, analyzing the impact that made, and accounting for it in the other cells. It was almost Sudoku like. After several runs through the hint set, I had all items isolated to the appropriate cells. And, of course, the very last thing one can figure out in this manner is the fish owner. ;)
Posted by: Jim A. | September 21, 2007 at 11:07
The owner of the fish is...(drum roll please)...the German living in the green house, drinking coffee, and smoking Prince.
Please don't challenge me like that again. Waaaay to time consuming! ;->
Posted by: The Interface | September 21, 2007 at 12:42
A: The German in the Green house drinking coffee and smoking Prince.
I used excel to get it, and here's what I got (I think it's correct).
From left to right:
1. Yellow house, Norwegian, water, Dunhill, cats
2. Blue house, Dane, tea, Blends, horses
3. Red house, Brit, milk, Pall Mall, birds
4. White house, Swede, beer, Blue Master, dogs
5. Green house, German, coffee, Prince, (no pet)
Posted by: Craig | September 21, 2007 at 13:43
The German has the fish, a conclusion I arrived at via a matrix and with no cheating whatsoever. (Unless, of course, I screwed up...) :)
Posted by: tgirsch | September 21, 2007 at 14:54
I'm probably not the first, but here you go:
The owner of the fish is the German, who drinks coffee, smokes Prince, and lives in the fourth house, which is painted green.
Posted by: Aaron Snell | September 22, 2007 at 01:37
Whoa. This took a lot of work and thinking. My dad had to help me. (it was the German!!!)Einstein is one smart guy.
Posted by: logicsmogic#1 | September 24, 2007 at 20:13
After screwing it up like Mark and determining that the Norwegian man owned the fish (for some reason I had determined that he didn't own cats) I went to check and found I was wrong. Then I went back and logically solved the problem even though I knew the answer. I believe I could have answered it had I been able to ask and be told my answer was wrong without being told what the right answer was.
Does that get me into at least the top 3%? ;)
Posted by: Matt | September 25, 2007 at 08:40