Eh, but the question “what is the spirit of the puzzle?” is, itself, the puzzle. If you can get inside the puzzle-maker’s head and figure out just which tricks he considers relevant and which he doesn’t, then the actual counting part is trivial.
Yeah, I came up with 7. If you took a t-shirt and sewed the sleeves shut, I’d say you now had something with 1 hole in it passing from the collar to the waist. If you open up the two sleeves, and tear four holes in the torso (as the puzzle seems to want us to assume), you get 7.
For those who say the neck to waist counts only as a single hole, how do you argue that the front to back matching holes are two? Topologically those are the same.
Well, it’s not a shirt, it’s a drawing of one, so really there are no holes at all, just variations in color.
But, if we’re going to imbue the drawing with shirt-like qualities for the sake of the puzzle, then 8 is the obvious answer.
There’s nothing special about the neck and waist, except that those are probably the largest holes. The same logic works whichever two you choose; sew the neck, waist, sleeves and two of the front-back holes shut and you have a topological tube again, with one hole going through it. Open up the other six holes and you have 7.
I suppose you could also consider every combination of entry and exit to be a hole. Take a balloon and cut two holes in the surface, call them A and B, and you have a tube with openings A and B. Cut two more holes, C and D, and now there are six combinations: AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, and CD. Using that reasoning (and the usual assumptions), the shirt would have 28 holes.
I too got eight immediately, and wondered what the trick was and how eight could be wrong. I was surprised it wasn’t after the build-up. I think 8 is a perfectly natural and reasonable answer. The background of the who page is what we see through the shirt, and we see a little jagged edge, so the holes don’t match up perfectly.
A topologist would say there are 8 holes and that was my answer right off the bat. Yes, a “shirt” with no holes would be a balloon.
Making all the reasonable assumptions about a shirt and the holes there still could be only 7 holes based on the evidence. There is no way to tell if there are more than one holes in the back.
For those who feel eight is a more reasonable answer than seven, what is the basis for this? Why do you feel two that small unseen holes in the back of the shirt is more reasonable than one large unseen hole?
We know there were two punctures in the front of the shirt. There are two holes. It is logical to assume that the holes we can see in the front were responsible for seeing through the shirt. Two punctures, piercing the shirt completely. To assume yet another hole we cannot see (one large unseen hole) is to create another unnecessary assumption. The concept of Occam’s Razor is that the hypothesis with the fewest number of assumptions is the best one. This is a classic example. So yes, using proper logic, 8 is the correct answer.
One hole in the back is not an additional assumption. Two holes in the back is a more complex assumption than just one hole. I have a lot of shirts with holes in them, none of them have matching front and back holes. I wouldn’t expect to see matching front and back holes in a shirt unless there were blood stains.
Yeah, we know that the hole(s) in back must be larger than the front ones, because we don’t see any of the back layer of fabric at all. And those two front holes are pretty close together: Make the back holes very much larger than the front ones, and they’ll merge. It’s only a fairly narrow range of possibilities that leaves the back holes big enough not to see them, but small enough to be separate.
I disagree. Assuming two holes exist when one hole would have the same effect is the more complicated assumption.
I first got the answer wrong because I thought six, and the trick was that people don’t think about the sleeves, neck, and waist.
Then, I was convinced by the eighters, because that’s the spirit of the puzzle.
Now, I’m a sevener, because what are the chances that the holes in the back match the front so exactly that you can’t see any threads? It’s clear that there could be one or two large holes in the back, because otherwise you couldn’t see straight through the front, and one is simpler. If these holes were made by a shot gun, for example, chances are the blast holes in the back could have merged. I liked the commentary that you would never see four holes lined up this way without seeing blood stains, and even then it’s unlikely.
Finally, though, is there any better message board anywhere? I absolutely love this thread. C’mon, topology? Does a donut have one hole or two? Blood stains? This is not a pipe? Perfection.
A good test doesn’t test your ability to guess what the test maker was thinking.
Is the waist actually a “hole”? If I told you I had a hole in my shirt, of course you would not think I was referring to the waist, sleeves, or neck. “Hole in a shirt” customarily means a flaw, tear, or wear in the shirt causing a hole that should not be there.
I could plausibly offer a lot of correct answers to this puzzle, including, quite truthfully, “It is impossible to know,” which makes it a shitty puzzle.
Oh, and we also can’t put any upper bound on the number of holes in the portion of the shirt we can’t see. Ordinarily, a shirt would have at most one unintended hole, because once a shirt has one, it’ll get thrown out. But here we have a shirt that, for some reason, was not thrown out after the first unintended hole: Maybe the wearer is that poor that they can’t afford another one, maybe that’s the style among their peer group, whatever. But once we’ve got a shirt with two or more tears, why wouldn’t there be many more? Is a shirt with five tears any less likely than one with three or four? If torn shirts are in fashion, then maybe the wearer deliberately tore as many holes as they could.
However, if there was one large hole in the back of the shirt, we would expect to see the back hem hanging lower than the front hem. Since the bottom of the shirt appears to be even all the way around, it can’t be the case that there is one big hole.
Y’all are overthinking this:
- It is not a photograph of a shirt-It is a crude drawing of a shirt with a couple of circles added. The nuances you bring up are in your imaginations.
- The person who drew it doesn’t give a shit about your actual answers(and probably doesn’t have an answer himself)-This is deliberately vague so that people will talk about it.
If you’re not interested in participating, you don’t have to post in the thread, you know.
If this is a game, then an answer should be available, right? If not, then my answer is just as valid as yours.
edited to add: I am agreeing with the OP-This IS a poorly designed puzzle. I am just adding my opinion that it is poorly designed on purpose.