Wednesday, February 01, 2006

A Budding Physicist

Now some will claim that I overheard the answer from Michael Emond at rehearsal this evening, but to be clear, I had not attempted the riddle yet and I pursued the riddle from a totally logic based stand-point: thus I did not rule out certain possibilities on the basis that I knew what the final answer was. I managed to work out the owner of each house and each owner's characteristics, and thus I would have been able to solve the riddle without Emond's help. Having the mental capacity to do so apparently classifies me as one of the top 2% smartest people in the world.

I would like to say that if this is true... the world is screwed. Totally screwed.


Albert Einstein’s Riddle

Are you in the top 2% of intelligent people in the world? Solve the riddle and find out.

There are no tricks, just pure logic, so good luck and don’t give up.

1. In a street there are five houses, painted five different colours.
2. In each house lives a person of different nationality.
3. These five homeowners each drink a different kind of beverage, smoke a different brand of cigar and keep a different pet.


The question: Who owns the fish?

Answer:

1. The Brit 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 owner of the green house 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 centre house drinks milk.
9. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
10. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
11. The man who keeps horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
12. The man 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 Blends has a neighbour who drinks water.

Albert Einstein wrote this riddle early during the 19th century. He said that 98% of the world’s population would not be able to solve it.

3 comments:

Kate said...

hmmm... I came up with the german owning the fish, in the green house,drinking coffee and smoking prince...

now I have to go see if I'm right ;)

Kate said...

whooo hooo! got it right. Guess that's why I started out in Astrophysics LOL!

actually, it isn't that hard once you build a matrix and color code the variables.

Liz said...

Actually, I didn't do the matrix, I drew little pictures of the houses and started placing people and things in them systematically. Must be the artist (rather than mathematician) in me.