UKH

Hi all,

A quiz if you have some time on your hands to have a go !

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Einstein wrote this riddle last century and said that 98% of the world's population would not be able to solve it.

• There are 5 houses that are each a different colour.

• There is a person of a different nationality in each house.

• The 5 owners drink a certain drink. They each smoke a certain brand of cigarettes and also have a certain pet. No owner has the same pet, smokes the same brand of cigarettes nor drinks the same drink.

• The question is. "Who has the fish?"

CLUES

1. The British man lives in the red house.

2. The Swedish man has a dog for a pet.

3. The Danish man drinks tea.

4. The green house is to the left of the white house.

5. The owner of the green house drinks coffee.

6. The person that smokes Pall Mall has a bird.

7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.

8. The person that lives in the middle house drinks milk.

9. The Norwegian lives in the first house.

10. The person that smokes Blend, lives next to the one that has a cat.

11. The person that has a horse lives next to the one that smokes Dunhill.

12. The one that smokes Bluemaster drinks beer.

13. The German smokes Prince.

14. The Norwegian lives next to a blue house.

15. The person that smokes Blend, has a neighbour that drinks water.

Have a go !

L

The German.

Highly doubtful:

"The puzzle is often called Einstein's Puzzle or Einstein's Riddle because it is said to have been invented by Albert Einstein as a boy; it is also sometimes attributed to Lewis Carroll. However, there is no known evidence for Einstein's or Carroll's authorship"

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra_Puzzle (warning: contains the solution and how to find it).

Similarly, there is no evidence that Einstein ever said anything about mankind's dependence on bees: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/einstein-on-bees/, although plenty of other people have expressed not dissimilar views in recent years.

People seem to like to attribute stuff to Einstein because it gives things an air of authority.  According to that Snopes article, the bees one was probably first attributed to him by the National Union of French Apiculture in 1994.

P.S. It's not a quiz (a test of knowledge), it's a puzzle (a test of ingenuity or reasoning ability).

I also got the German. 

I had to write down scraps of information at a time to solve it. Is there an easier way? 

It's a grid logic puzzle and a simple one as the problem could be solved with fewer clues. 

Well ... any one of them could have fish for lunch

The horse. Obviously

Who has the fish?

Apparently UK fishermen post-Brexit.

Or the Scottish if the Union breaks up.

The Hong Conger.

Nah; they've already sold their fishing rights to the Spanish...

Eel be chuffed with that

Does the Brits' bird sit on a Perch?

As for 98% of the population, I think that stat, if there is any truth in it, says more about persistance than intellect.

Please at least tell me Einstein said that there were two infinite things and he wasn’t sure about the universe?!

jcm

And the one about your hand on a beautiful girl vs your hand on a red hot iron

None of them.

Not one of the clues mention a fish.

Therefore there is no reason to believe that any of them have a fish.

I just did it for the Halibut

I tried it now several times and seem to arrive at different answers, I must be doing something wrong somewhere 

Start with the Norwegian in an unknown colour house. The next is Blue.

Green comes before White but Green can't be middle as that conflicts with the statement about Green + Coffee and Middle+Milk.

The Norwegian can't be Red as that the British. So order must be Yellow,Blue,Red,Green,White

From there you just need to fill in the grid. Look for each descriptor which houses are valid for which options. You quickly find pairs that exclude others leaving obvious solutions. Like with Milk and Coffee positioned Water could go anywhere but Tea and Beer can both only go Blue or White, so Water goes with Yellow.

I hate to say it, but am I alone in thinking that this is just such a dull intellectual exercise? It just seems such a tedious waste of time as a puzzle. I can't for the life of me think where its interest lies.

As with Sudoku etc., solving this type of puzzle is rather formulaic. However, it gives you something to do while sitting on a bus or train when you cannot, for some reason, concentrate enough to read or work.

CB

Sudokus I find very interesting. Hard to explain why. I suppose because they are so surprisingly varied; i.e., they seem to vary in character as well as difficulty.

Surely the cat caught the fish.............

I don't find them varied at all, the general approach is always the same. Fine with me, I like Sudokus as a distraction.

CB

I see them as being a bit like the mental equivalent of physical limbering-up exercises. Wakes up the mind in the morning.