supposed to have been written by einstein, only 2% of the population can do it (supposedly), and quite easily the hardest logic puzzle i’ve ever attempted:
* There are 5 houses, each is a different color.
* In each house lives a person of a different nationality.
* These 5 owners all drink a certain beverage, smoke a certain brand of cigar and keep a certain pet.
* No owner has the same pet, smokes the same brand of cigar or drinks the same drink as another owner.
* All the houses are in a line.
1: The Briton lives in a red house.
2: The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
3: The Dane drinks tea.
4: The green house is on the left of the white house.
5: The green house owner 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 house right in the center drinks milk.
9: The Norwegian lives in the first house.
10: The man who smokes Blend lives next to the one who keeps cats.
11: The man who keeps horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
12: The owner who smokes Blue Master drinks beer.
13: The German smokes Prince.
14: The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15: The man who smokes Blend has a neighbor who drinks water.
i had a quick go, but it doesnt seem that logically tight to me.
SPOILER>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
the following doesnt break any of the rules:
colour nation bev smoke pet position
yellow norweg water dunhil cats 1st
blue dane tea blend horse 2nd
red briton milk palmal birds 3rd
green german coffee prince fish 4th
white swede beer blumas dog 5th
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<SPOILER
EDIT: so i agree with ben. Why is this meant to be hard? Its just pushing shaped blocks around. In my head with a time limit maybe, but on paper its a doddle.
how do you figure it out that fast? i’ve been working on it all morning, and i’m usually good at these…
seriously i made this big grid thing and everything to check the information given and so far i haven’t figured out hardly anything except a whole lot of stuff that isn’t… definitive i guess. like the green house owner doesn’t smoke dunhill. and about 200 other things. it’s quite annoying.
I used a few sets of matrices to solve it. I think one of the mistakes that people make is to try and work everything out in relation to only one constant (e.g. nationality). But a lot of the information is not relational to nationality and so you’ll never solve it if you require knowledge of nationality (or house position) at every stage. At some points, I knew the house position, beverage and house colour but didn’t know the nationality.
Having two sets of matrices and also a diagram of the houses helped me solve the problem much quicker.
oreso, why do you not think it is logically tight? Do you mean that there could be a number of possible arrangements? I’m not convinced.
that is what i mean, but im not convinced either (a slight point, “left” is ambiguous. I worked out that it must mean “before” because we naturally assume that left comes before right, but people who read right to left wont think this)
I just tabulated stuff (combining tables only when a relation was explicitly stipulated), and then laid these tables on top of each other, and my first attempt at arranging them worked. This is what made it seem ad hoc.
I didnt save my working, but I had a little attempt at rearranging them and got bored, so I’ll take it as good.
It’s logically tight, I just did it with a simple table of the five houses. It actually all falls into place naturally even when you don’t bother with matrices, for me it was the green&coffee/white pairing, forced them to be on the far right, everything from there was child’s play.
Creation Imperfect, a cross-hatch table is a matrix way of solving, it’s just a lot of matrices all in one big table.
I love solving things like this! I used the grid system because I get a strange sense of accomplishment looking at all my X’s and O’s when I’m done. Thanks for posting this, creation imperfect.
