Other points of order:
If the room is considered as a cube, not a simple square - a room might be ‘square’, but not a square - and there were cats in every corner (four of them suspended close to the ceiling through means likely best not imagined), there would be more than three cats visible to each of the cats, and the premise is inconsistently worded.
If they’re Schrodinger’s cats, we simply won’t know how many are still living until we look.
Squares are plane figures, defined as four corners. There’s a cat in each one, each having three cats in its peripheral 90-degrree l view, as it surveys its relevant environment the way cats do. Four cats.
You can’t come back later and say “Well, maybe Escher designed the room with a square floor but a hexagonal ceiling and the other cats are on a mobius strip and they can all levitate”. Maybe shmaybe.
I also object to these sorts of riddles because under the pretense of the smug teller of it pretending that they are so smart, they fail to understand that what makes human beings “smart” includes the ability to filter out background information and make default assumptions that then allow us to go on and solve the next problem that arises so we aren’t reinventing the wheel every time we are faced with the issue.
It is like the old question: “Do they have a Fourth of July in England?” The gist of the question is to get you to answer “no” because it is an American holiday, but the “true” answer is “yes” because they have July 4 on their calendar.
But I object to this because as a human being you are making a default assumption. If a small child asked you that question, you would almost certainly be correct in assuming that the child was not asking you if they used the same calendar but omitted that date from it. You would be correct in assuming that the question that was asked was “Do they celebrate the Fourth of July, or Independence Day, in England?” and the correct answer would be no.
Just like the “a plane crashes into a cemetery where are the survivors buried” question. Your highly evolved brain is trained to pick up on context clues. You see “plane” “crash” “cemetery” “buried” and think of whether they bury the dead in the same cemetery where they crashed. Nobody would ever ask to bury survivors so you ignore that part.
This is not a weakness but a benefit. It allows your brain to skip unnecessary steps and proceed to higher problem solving.
It’s a bogus question. There is no way anybody can get four cats to sit still for this nonsense.
Unless they are Marjory’s cats on Mom. Are those cats drugged?
There are good riddles, where the answer requires genuine imagination and lateral thinking. The problem is that it’s generally difficult to know whether it’s a good question with an interesting answer, or just the kind waste of time that you’re describing. All you can do is trust the judgment of the person passing on the riddle; so anything off Facebook is probably a waste of time.
I knew I shouldn’t have done this, but this thread got me started:
Four golfers named Mr. Black, Mr. White, Mr. Brown and Mr. Blue were competing in a tournament. The caddy didn’t know their names, so he asked them. One of them, Mr. Brown, told a lie.
The 1st golfer said “The 2nd Golfer is Mr. Black.”
The 2nd golfer said “I am not Mr. Blue!”
The 3rd golfer said “Mr. White? That’s the 4th golfer.”
And the 4th golfer remained silent. Which one of the golfers is Mr. Blue?
Here is my analysis:
[spoiler] It’s #4. Why?
#2 and #4 cannot be Brown. We are told that Brown told a lie. #4 didn’t say anything, so he is not Brown. #2 makes a statement that he is not Blue, therefore if he is Brown, he has told the truth, therefore #2 is not Brown.
That leaves us with #1 and #3 as possibilities for Brown.
Let’s assume #1 is Brown. Therefore #3’s statement is true, making White#4. #2 says he is not Blue, leaving only #3 to be Blue and #2 is then Black by elimination. However this is not possible as if Brown is #1, then his statement that #2 is Black would have to be true, which the rules say is not.
Therefore Brown must be #3. That makes golfer #1’s statement that #2 is Black to be true. So we have #2 Black, #3 Brown. Again by process of elimination, Brown must lie which means #4 is not White, #1 is White, which leaves #4 to be Blue.
So it is
But these people on Facebook are telling me I have overlooked something and that Blue as #3 is the definitely correct answer![/spoiler]
Much less an infinite number.
But my question is: If one of the turtles needs a break, can a cat take its place?
For simplicity’s sake, may we assume the cats are spherical?
There’d be no need to “get” an infinite number of cats to sit still - they’d be mashed together by an infinitely strong gravitational force.
Their normal shape may be more useful, since cats tessellate.
Just for the record, that was not my intent in reposting the riddle. And it was not the intent of the OP on Facebook, who says the answer is 4. And that is the real answer in the real world. When I said there were 8 corners in a square room, well there are. But one needs to suppose those corners have little shelves the cats have been placed on, or that the cats cat levitate.
The thread of Facebook is still going back and forth between the OP who says 4 and others who say 8 and others who say an infinite number. And the OP there saying to the guy saying there are 8 cats, “I sure don’t remember you being that annoying”
I didn’t mean to cause so much trouble.
What if the square room is wallpapered with cat posters?
Yeah, I wasn’t talking about you in particular. I saw the same puzzle last week, and then the person who posted it insisted that 4 was not the right answer. And that’s the problem. 4 is a perfectly good answer based on the information we have, and reasonable real-world assumptions about cats, rooms, directions and levitation.
But without knowing exactly which assumptions the person made, it’s impossible to get the “right” answer by anything other than chance.
My thought would be 24 cats:
There are 4 corners in the room only if you define a “corner” as 3 dimensional, but if every corner is 2 dimensionally defined, there are 6 x 2D surfaces in the cubic room, and each of those surfaces has 4 cats. This also assumes “in front” is being straight ahead or within 45 degrees.
As far as keeping the felines still, for experimental purposes, I’d use a water soluble adhesive to glue the cats to the ceiling and walls.
But I do agree that’s it a stupid puzzle.
It reminds me of my son’s riddle from age 10:
Q:You’re trapped in a room with no doors or windows and only a broken mirror on the floor. How do you get out?
A: Put the mirror pieces together which makes them “whole” and then jump through the “hole”.
This sounds like it belongs with the classics like…
…and the greatest of them all…
Negative. All cats have a mouth and an anus which are connected, making them tori.
Although, if you ask Michael Stevens of the Vsauce YouTube channel, there are several more holes in your head that connect to the main one making us and our mammalian brethren more complex than a mere one-holed torus.