I just stayed up entirely too late figuring out this puzzle that was purportedly created by Albert Einstein, who claimed only 2% of the world’s population could solve it. This story is likely apocryphal, and certainly more than 2% of all people could solve it, given enough time. Hopefully this won’t detract from your enjoyment of it:
Facts:
- There are 5 houses in 5 different colors.
- In each house lives a person with a different nationality.
- These 5 owners drink a certain beverage, smoke a certain brand of cigar and keep a certain pet.
- No owners have the same pet, smoke the same brand of cigar or drink the same drink.
Hints:
- The Brit lives in a red house.
- The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
- The Dane drinks tea.
- The green house is on the left of the white house.
- The green house owner drinks coffee.
- The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds.
- The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
- The man living in the house right in the center drinks milk.
- The Norwegian lives in the first house.
- The man who smokes Blend lives next to the one who keeps cats.
- The man who keeps horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
- The owner who smokes Blue Master drinks beer.
- The German smokes Prince.
- The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
- The man who smokes Blend has a neighbor who drinks water.
The question is:
Who owns the fish?
I hope people actually give this a try. If you want to check your answer, or are too lazy to give it a go, the summary and solution can be found here:
http://pages.prodigy.net/spencejk/AEinSol.html#AES
you can bet i have a spreadsheet started… but i’ve been slacking at work too much lately. i’ll see if i can do this after hours.
I did it! 🙂
Nice! It felt so good when I got it. Took me about an hour and a lot of it was slow going, but it sped up towards the end and I ploughed through the finish line. Congrats!
There are advantages to being in a hospital waiting room for hours upon end – each time I got a little frustrated, I could put it down for a few minutes, realize there was nothing more interesting to do, and pick it up to struggle onwards, sans distractions!