Here’s a little quiz for you intellectual types (something to leave you with before I go):
Supposedly, Einstein wrote this quite some time ago and the claim is that 98% of the World wouldn’t be able to figure it out. I think you Dopers can squeeze into that 2%. It should go w/out saying that if you’ve seen this before, let the others try their wits at it before y’all throw in the solution, otherwise, I’ll provide it when I get back.
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NOTE: the solution can be found using nothing but logic, there is never any need to guess and the use of software is cheating.
There are five houses in five different colors.
In each house lives a person with a different nationality.
These five owners drink a certain drink, smoke a certain brand of cigar/cigarette, and keep a certain pet. No owners have the same pet, cigar or drink preference.
The question is — who owns the fish?
Hints:
[ul][li]The Brit lives in the red house.[/li][li]The Swede keeps a dog for a pet.[/li][li]The Dane drinks tea.[/li][li]The green house is on the left of the white house.[/li][li]The green house owner drinks coffee.[/li][li]The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds.[/li][li]The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.[/li][li]The man living in the house right in the center drinks milk.[/li][li]The Norwegian lives in the first house.[/li][li]The man who smokes blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.[/li][li]The man who keeps horses lives next to the one who smokes Dunhill.[/li][li]The owner of a Bluemaster drinks beer.[/li][li]The German smokes Prince.[/li][li]The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.[/li][li]The man who smokes blend has a neighbor who drinks water.[/li][/ul]
There are lots of problems of this sort out there (and the Einstein attribution is surely apocryphal). When I took the GRE, the analytical section had a bunch of these.
Question: does this class of brain-teasers have a name?
thinksnow, I don’t mind you posting this. I didn’t play the first time.
I have a lot of trouble believing that 98% of the world couldn’t solve this though. I’m not that smart and I got it even with my two-year-old “helping” me.
Sorry if this isn’t too helpful, but like Firefly said, the GREs have tons of these so, presumably, a good GRE prep site would probably have a few. Question is whether or not there are any good GRE prep sites online…
For a slightly more difficult type of logic problem, you might want to try the books of Raymond Smullyan. He slowly introduces more and more difficult problems.
I don’t know about online resources, but Dell has a series of books titled “Logic Puzzles” (the puzzles themselves are much more creative than the title) that are available in the games sections of most generic bookstores. I have 4 of the books and they have 75 of these kinds of puzzles each.
The Norwegian lives in a yellow house, drinks water, smokes Dunhill, and keeps cats.
The Dane lives in a blue house, drinks tea, smokes Blend, and has horses.
The Brit lives in a red house, drinks milk, smokes Pall Mall and keeps birds.
The Swede lives in a white house, drinks beer, smokes Blue Master, and has a dog.
The German lives in a green house, drinks coffee, smokes Prince, and keeps an unknown fifth kind of animal as a pet.
The fish are never mentioned in the clues, and the question only asks “who owns fish?”, so I intend to stubbornly hang on to my answer that no one owns the fish.
You know, attributing this puzzle to Einstein is typical of a common sort of story. It’s as though people think that there’s such a small number of extremely smart people that any even mildly challenging little intellectual exercise must be due to one of them. The notion that this problem would require Einstein to invent it or only could be solved by a small proportion of people is absurd. Anybody can solve this problem in an afternoon just by exhausting over all the possible solutions.
As a rule, if you hear of something being attributed to Einstein and you don’t have a citation for it in an encyclopedia or biography of Einstein, assume that it’s a false attribution.
