No, it’s not homework. I haven’t been to school for 23 years. It’s just a brain teaser than I am really struggling with and I know that there must be people here that can do this.
Six teams have moved to a new location, all living on one side of a street. The houses are numbered sequentially from 1 to 6. (e.g. House #3 is between #2 and #4, NOT # 1 and 0). Clues are given pertaining to the house number, colour, their car, and their pet.
Work out the house numbers of each team, who owns which pet and car.
Clues
Alan-san lives next to the owner of the Ferrari
The Donkey lives next door to the Purple House
Team Boodi live next to the Elephant
The Blue House is right between the Red House and the house with the Mercedes
The Giraffe lives right between the house with the Porsche and Biggles Bear’s house
The BMW Iives" at the Green House
Maccamob live in a house numbered less than Team Boodi’s house
Kiwideb lives in the Red House
The Chimpanzee lives in the Blue House
Muzza lives in the White House
The White House is next to the Yellow House
The Lamborghini is right between the Horse and the Green House
The Donkey lives in a house with a number higher than the Blue House
Team Boodi drive a Maserati
The Tiger is not next to the Green House
Muzza lives next but one to the house with the Giraffe (i.e. there is one house in between)
Maccamob own the Girffe
Alan-san lives in the Blue House
The Tiger lives next to the Chimpanzee
Kiwideb does not drive a Porsche
The Green House has a higher number than the house with the Tiger
The Red House is not number 4
The White House is not number 2
The owner of the Mercedes lives next to Alan-san
Muzza does not live in house number 6
The horse fives in a house with a higher number Biggles Bear
I used to do this sort of problem all the time. It’s a bit difficult to describe, but the trick is to draw a big grid, with all the criteria up one axis, and all the criteria up the other axis (I’m sure there are examples online, but not sure where to find them).
You can then make a check mark in the grid of how, say, a car relates to a house. Once you know that the BMW is at the green house, you can eliminate the relationship between the BMW and any other house, and the house and any other car - I use a dot to indicate a negative relationship. Once you have this in place, you can see that anything that happens in the vertical column to the house must similarly happen on the horizontal row to the BMW. Eventually some of the negatives you add in, and other logical inferences you draw from other information, will give you lots of negatives, and you’ll be able to find rows or columns where there simply couldn’t be any other relationships between two elements.
I’m not going to give you the answers, though I do intend to do this one for my own pleasure this lunchtime.
You can get books full of these. They are generally called logic puzzles and are my favourite type of brain exercise. Give me these over crosswords anyday.
Fun for you guys – I spent yesterday checking corrections on one title so it could go to printer – and today I’ll be marking corrections on another title. It’s not too fun when the test-solver says “there’s a problem 90% of the way through the answer of this five-star puzzle” and I have to figure out what the problem is and fix it. No, you can’t usually look at that one sentence and see how it needs to be rephrased – you have to start at the beginning so you can see where it went wrong.
I’ve got to get an underling trained to get these titles off my desk again.
Won’t you LSAT people just leave me the hell ALONE?!?!?!
I took your damn test. I aced your damn test. That means I don’t have to put up with you following me around any more, damn you!!!
I won’t say you’re right but if you’re not right, we’re both wrong together. Damn that was a tough one and now I’ll have to stay at work an extra hour just to catch up on what I should have been doing. I swear these puzzles are like crack, potato chips and bubble wrap all rolled into one geeky burrito.
I’ve emailed jjimm to get the grid he suggests.
Even though the answer has been provided (which I really, really appreciate), I would still like to try and work it out using some type of method.
My method is rather random which probably explains why I can’t get it. Obviously I would have failed the LSAT’s (whatever they are).
Now if I get stuck, I can see where I’m going wrong from the answer too.
I really appreciate the effort you guys go to to help someone half a planet away that you don’t even know. That’s part of what I love about this place.
SATs are “Scholastic Aptitude Tests” which are what everyone takes to get into college. The LSATs and MCATs are the Law and Medical versions of these, respectively, which take you from college to professional school.
As for your method, you pretty much need to apply rigorous logic. There will be some cases where you can only determine that (e.g.) Alan drives a Volvo because you know that:
Dave’s in a red house, and you know that house doesn’t have a Volvo
Bob has a pet who gets carsick in Volvos
Charlie drives the Porsche
Edwin is in the #6 house and the Volvo is in an odd-numbered house.
…and you can only determine some of the above facts through the same sort of deduction.
Standard practice is to draw an “O” when you match a person to a trait, and then "X"s horizontally and vertically from that “O”. Eventually you’ll find four "X"s in a row, and you can deduce the location of the “O”.
I took the Scholastic Aptitude Test, and you apparently did as well. However, the PC police prevailed at the College Board, and today’s high-school students obsess over the Scholastic Assessment Test.
Caught@Work: I’m a veteran solver of logic problems, and thus got the correct answers to this one, but it did take me a ciuple of hours. If you keep attempting these, you’ll improve with practice!
Finally I got it. Got the breakthrough last night in bed when I couldn’t sleep, so got up at 1.30 to put the finishing touches to it. How sad is that? I’ve only had 5 hours’ sleep because of this damn thing.
Hmm, I’m not sure what the appropriate limits of self-promotion are – but I can tell you that the November issue of Official’s Logic Problems, has a four-light-bulb puzzle, #57, entitled “Following a Thread.” The story starts out as follows:
I’m pretty sure that issue is off the newsstands, so here’s the whole thing:
I’ve developed a strong attachment (verging on addiction) to a particular online message board, known to its fans as the Slightly Demented Message Board (SDMB for short). It’s a place where like-minded folks gather to share ideas, experiences, jokes, expertise, and commentary by posting in the various threads. One of the first things I did when I got home from a week’s vacation was log on to see what had been going on at the SDMB while I was gone. I was delighted to find that six of my favorite posters had each started a new thread, each on a different day of the six that I was gone (Monday through Saturday, inclusive). Each of the Dementos (as denizens of the message board call themselves) has a different screen name; each had posted on a different topic; and each, as it turns out, is from a different U.S. state. By the time I logged on, each of the threads had had a different number of responses (from 10 to 100, rounded to the nearest multiple of ten). Determine, for each day, the screen name of the person who started a thread, the topic of his or her original post, his or her home state, and the number of responses to his or her thread.
Rue de Day (who isn’t from Washington) started a thread that was either about the hijinks of his crazy cats or about getting lost on a hike.
The person from New York started a thread the day after the person whose thread had garnered 80 responses and sometime before someone started a thread discussing the rumors of a reunion of the musical group Fairport Convention.
Cartooniverse and the person who started the thread to rave about the actor-comedian Mark Addy are, in some order, the person from Georgia and the person whose thread had 60 posts.
The thread started by the person from Washington had either 30 more or 30 fewer posts than the thread that the person from Pennsylvania started.
The thread with the most posts was started sometime after the thread on Fairport Convention.
Koeeoaddi and the person whose thread inquired about the origin of the word “deadline” are, in some order, the person from Pennsylvania and a person whose thread had fewer than 90 posts.
The thread that discussed Mark Addy had more responses than the thread started Tuesday and fewer than the thread that Twickster started.
The thread that SwampBear started had either 50 more or 50 fewer posts than another thread.
The person from Ohio started a thread the day before someone started the thread about crazy cat antics.
The thread that discussed Fairport Convention and the thread that was started the day before Rue de Day started a thread were, in some order, the thread that the person from Maryland started and the thread that was started two days before the thread that discussed Mark Addy.
FairyChatMom and the person from New York are, in some order, the person who started the thread about plans for repainting a foyer and the person who started a thread the day after Rue de Day started started a thread.
Alas, I was amusing myself with a bunch of in-jokes, so some of the answers won’t be too hard for you to figure out.
