What is Digg?95 Comments
- wheremyarm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Once again, because people keep posting the link to http://www.amazeingart.com/fun/einstein-quiz-answer.html (and by the way, who registers a domain without checking the spelling first?):
"The five owners drink a different drink, smoke a different brand of cigar and keep a different pet, one of which is a Walleye Pike."
That's in the intro to the logic problem, so have know one person owns a Walleye Pike, which is a FISH. "AmazeingArt" is referencing a different puzzle, or this one was worded incorrectly. - thegrinder, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Actually, you are all wrong. It took me about 30 seconds to figure out the REAL answer and with no scratch paper.
Go there if you want to see the real answer:
http://www.amazeingart.com/fun/einstein-quiz-answer.html - alexander000, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"What I don't get is why everyone thinks that this schmo at
amazeingart.com has the definitive answer?!? What makes him
the expert - he's just expressing an opinion! All the other
web sites with the solve have the answer as the others above have."
amen.
oh and if you follow the hints correctly you are left with only two possible places where the green and white houses could be. So, the green one is on the left. The hints leave no room for error. - JaredB, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1*sarcastically* Wow, I guess the users of Digg are the smartest group of people on the earth! :)
- gof202, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The question is "who owns the fish?" A Walleye Pike IS a fish...there is no assumption made about that. Therefore I respectfully disagree with amazeingart.com.
P.S. The whole spiel about 2% a'int true...plenty of kids studying for the LSAT solve questions just like this all the time. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0The German ownes Schrodinger's catfish
The giveaway was the clue about keeping "horses" (plural) despite the stipulation that each house owner kept a "certain pet" (singular) - Pthalio, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0
Following the wording of the coudal site, it took me about 15min with some paper to get the answer. They do say "There are no tricks, pure logic will get you the correct answer. And yes, there is enough information to arrive at the one and only correct answer." so I would argue that it means that one of the people in the puzzle *must* own the fish.
The wording on the other site is different so I agree with Dwatch.. though I will concede that with the wording on the amazingart site I probably would have arrived at the same answer and been wrong. - curt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0The original puzzle did not include the reference to the Walleye Pike. With that extra piece of information, the puzzle is eventually solvable by most of the people on the planet by using simple charts. Without the Walleye Pike reference, the original intent of the puzzle was to test one's ability to examine and utilize the facts without falling into the trap of making assumptions.
- capajc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0To those that claim they did it in their heads: if you can routinely keep a mental picture of 5 rows each of 6 random objects, then kudos. Hopefully you're using your mental powers for good. I doubt as many can that claim it, however.
Nice puzzle. Had fun doing it. - DarthJay, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Yeah -- you have the Dane and the Norweigen living in the same house. The riddle (as written at http://www.coudal.com/thefish.php) says "In each house lives a person with a different nationality," so the Dane and the Norweigan cannot live in the same house. If you move the Dane to house 2, then the Dane no longer drinks tea -- which breaks rule #3. If you move the Norweigan to house 2, he no longer lives in the first house, which breaks rule #10.
Sorry...there is only one answer. - becks, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0About 10 min using excel including the time it took to input all the options to deduct. The answer about not knowing who, if anyone owns a fish is cheesy, that answer is the lazy mans answer. I agree with the Green German answer.
The guy with 2 answers, you had a lot of wrong things happening in your second solution.
I hope there are more of these things that make you think. - mbacas, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0(Park708) who got 2 solutions. You have "DOGS" for both your 4th and 5th house for your Norwegian solution.
- mbacas, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Oh, and for all you knuckleheads who've shared your answers, perhaps you're not as smart as you think you are. Since there were prizes involved you've only (possibly) decreased your chances of winning. :)
- Mark - DWatch, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0thegrinder is incorrect. The amazingart web site is not directly refering to the quiz that coudal.com is showing on their web site. That one is a derivation of the orignial one by Einstein. "The Real Solution to the Einstein Quiz" article is correct if you read the original puzzel and how Einstein worded it. The one we have been working on directly says one of the five has a walleyed fish. Nowhere in the original puzzel do they mention a fish, other than the title of the puzzel. You just work on the puzzel assuming that the person who is missing a pet owns a fish. In this version of the puzzel, that is correct. In Einstein's version, its only correct realatively speaking.
- Park708, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0NORWEGIAN SOLUTION
House 1: Dane, Norwegian, yellow, tea, dunhills, walleye
House 2: blue, beer, bluemasters, horses
House 3: Brit, red, milk, pall malls, birds
House 4: swede, green, coffee, blends, dogs
House 5: German, white, water, princes, cats
(house 1 is furthest left, house 5 is furthest right)
This is the solution I meant to write before (i had dogs in house 5 instead of cats). I've checked the rules several times for this arrangement, and it seems to satisfy them all for the way this riddle was written at http://www.coudal.com/thefish.php
1. The Brit lives in the 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 Malls keeps birds.
7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhills.
8. The man living in the house right in the center drinks milk.
9. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
10. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
11. The man who keeps horses lives next to the one who smokes Dunhills.
12. The owner who smokes Bluemasters drinks beer.
13. The German smokes Princes.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.
Can anyone find any reason that this solution does not work? - xtmno3, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I had some fun proving to myself I could do this. And to the people who said they could do it in like 1 minute without paper, yeah...lies! Would take longer than a minute to read all the hints and make sense of what is going on.
- nortonbl, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I got it! It took about 15 mins, and scratch paper (Is that cheating?)
-Bri - shade73, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0it was the brit in the pink house with the candlestick... oh wait... wrong puzzle
- college713, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I did it in about 4 minutes without any paper to help. Not to hard but I can definitely see people having difficulty with it.
- nickm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"Note: We were tempted to include the phrase "show your work" with the rules for entry but then we figured that any dork who would Google a puzzle like this in order to win would have to live with self-loathing and guilt for the rest of their life and that would far outweigh the value of the prize package. Yes, we are in fact talking to you Nick M."
ARGHHHH!!! it knows my name! - DarthJay, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0And just for clarification, incase you try to tell me that 2 people of different nationalities can live in the same house, remember, the riddle said, "The five owners drink a different drink, smoke a different brand of cigar and keep a different pet."
Your Norweigan solution has the Norweigan and the Dane drinking the same drink, smoking the same cigar and keeping the same pet -- this also breaks the rules of the riddle. - elfhat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I got it in a few minutes with scratch paper. I'm sure that more than 2% can figure it out tho.
- singleton, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I'm sure the puzzle that Einstein thought of didn't include the clause that someone had a fish. I believe that most people can deduce the logistics but probably only around 2% would stop and think that the puzzle is inconclusive assuming the fish clause wasn't there.
- onionkid, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I was able to solve it in my head last night, but it took me 4 hours, I didn't create a chart in my mind-converting the key words into variables, I felt that Einstein didn't want the puzzle solved that way, rather I thought of it as a real life situation.
I think reyemka is right:
i think that more than 2% of the world could figure that out using scratch paper. take away the paper and 98% is probably right.
Also there can be only one configuration I'm sure. We have a right answer to the question-the most obvious-the one Einstein would have seen first (he made the puzzle). If Einstein had another configuration in mind, he would not have had our possibility. He would have reworded the question to eliminate the fourth green housed German as an answer. - megamojo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This thread makes me think about the "google it you moron" thread. Sure, you could spend time and mental effort googling for the answer, or you could just read this thread. I agree that many questions should just be googled, but i've been burned by a rapid fire jackass answer before...I was trying to find out how to rip star wars episode one without having nearly transparent, ghost-like forced subtitles for the alien languages. After hours of googling and searching specific forums, i finally found a post from a guy who had the exact same problem as me. The answer? "Read rule number 9 before posting." Rule 9 was about a descriptive subject, which the original poster definitely had.
Btw, i got the dane in the 4th house because i did not assume that "to the left" meant right next to the white house. - alexander000, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"i got the dane in the 4th house because i did not assume that "to the left" meant right next to the white house."
no, the hints follow a logical sequence, and you come to the point where you only don't know two of the house colors - the 4th and 5th house. And since the green house is somewhere to the left of the white one, the green house has to be the 4th house. - TKDWILSON, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0You guys give people way too much credit. I think 2% is probably right. I struggled with this for like an hour and a half before I realized I was reading "right in the center" as "right of the center". lol After that it went quick. People generally would not be able to solve this though. Digg users are some of the smartest people in the world. Just think about it. If you are on here 1. You use a computer. 2. You can read. 3. You are into technology. 4. You replied to this post which means you have an interest in Einstein or puzzles. That really probably makes you pretty smart. A few idiots here who are jerks, but most people here, even if you couldn't solve it, are pretty smart. I wonder how many people here would be Mensa smart if they were ever tested. I bet almost half.
Eric Wilson - Nightwatcher, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0To everyone that thinks that more than 2% of the people in the world could solve this puzzle I think you're forgetting a couple of major things:
1.) only a small percentage of the worlds population are educated to a level where they have encountered algebra
2.) different people speak different languages and so their brains will follow different logical processes attuned to the nuances of the structure of their own languages.
Basically, Einstein was an educated European whose work centred on a very technical field. If you've been brought up in an area where many people are educated to High School level and above, then more than 2% of those you know will be able to solve the problem.
Bare in mind that the majority of the world have spent their teenage years trying to earn enough money to live and have not had the luxury of being able to spend much of their time tuning their brains to the particular logic of this sort of abstraction.
In future don't always read the phrase "x% of the world" or "x fraction of people" and so on to mean "x% of the educated class of American society". I would have thought that many of the people who were smart enough to solve this problem would also be smart enough to avoid this sort of bias.
The other thing is- while it doesn't matter to the solution if you take "to the left" to mean directly to the left or not, it does affect the complexity of the proof. Don't forget to take this into account also. - devilish, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0What I don't get is why everyone thinks that this schmo at
amazeingart.com has the definitive answer?!? What makes him
the expert - he's just expressing an opinion! All the other
web sites with the solve have the answer as the others above have. - edster, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0also, you have to assume that the houses start on the left. Meaning that house #1 is the left most and house #5 is the rightmost. However, I think you can assume this and assume neightbor means next door and that the 5th pet is fish. Quit overthinking the thing
- DickBreath, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0In answer to spoiler above, that's what I got.
Took about 20 minutes on paper.
Some years ago I had previously solved, and studied a similar problem in Peter Norvig's book on Artificial Intelligence and Common Lisp. - hoopy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0In reply to spoiler: same thing I got too, took about 35 minutes using excel. Most of the time was spent thinking about how I should organize the data.
- lingeek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+090 minutes without paper
- DickBreath, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I did NOT assume that the "first" house is the "left" house. I DID assume that "first" could mean EITHER right or left.
What I did do is to assume that "first" probably meant "left", and went with that, hoping that I would not then need to treat first as right.
Its a big constraint problem. Whether first means left or right is just one more variable that you must play with.
Maybe item 10 of the puzzle would have been better worded by saying something like...
10. The Norwegian has only has one neighbor.
or
10. The Norwegian has a neighbor on one side, but not on the other side.
or
10. The Norwegian's house is on one end of the row of houses. - nmoline, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1That article was dumb the question specifically states one of them has the fish! So there ya go Einstein was not tricking anyone its the German quit overthinking!
- masterzora, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I didn't time myself, but I did it. I used scratch paper, yes, but I refrained from making a chart. I just scratched notes here and there. (The funny part was that I had the answer when I only had half the data figured out and I just finished it to be positive.)
- RomyNo1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0God, it took me awhile, but I got it. It was fun, but if what thegrinder's link says is true, then Einstein was an ass.
- floppytaco, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Man this took me way to long but I did get it though. My brain needs another work out. Does anyone know of a place on the web that has more of these?
- Mike_G_NYC, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0ok, i see, the question needs to be a bit more specific with its left and rights, but it can work either way i guess
- crippler45, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0a lot of people are saying that more than 2% can get this puzzle, but you have to remember that people who are used to using computers a lot think logically and that not all the people who said they got it really did.
- thegrinder, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Ah, ok. I have seen this before and the other time I saw this brain teaser they didn't have that part about the Pike.
- Ender61484, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I got it in 14 minutes with Excel.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0The German
- Park708, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I found two solutions
Both setting house 1 as the farthest left, and assuming that rule 10 means that the green house is immediately to the left of the white house.
GERMAN SOLUTION
House 1: Norwegian, yellow, water, dunhills, cats
House 2: Dane, blue, tea blends, horses
House 3: Brit, red, milk, pall malls, birds
House 4: German, green, coffee, princes, walleye
House 5: swede, white, beer, bluemasters, dogs
NORWEGIAN SOLUTION
House 1: Dane, Norwegian, yellow, tea, dunhills, walleye
House 2: blue, beer, bluemasters, horses
House 3: brit, red, milk, pall malls, birds
House 4: swede, green, coffee, blends, dogs
House 5: German, white, water, princes, dogs
I've checked this several times, they both agree with all the rules... - Mexrocker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I got it! I'm proud... a good 10-15 min, i had mized up two of the nationalities by mistake... pretty fun
- devilish, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Interesting -- because the puzzle still holds if
you think "on the left" means "directly" or "somewhere on the left". I interpreted as "Directly to the left" as that seemed to be the more likely of the two given the text.
To those who say that the answer is "who knows" because of the amazeingart, I think the
question/instruction of this puzzle is exacting
like Guni said: maybe the puzzle that
the amazeingart.com is referencing had a
different intro text? - Scorpion1337, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I got it. I had to use an excel spreadsheet and 2 sticky notes.
- NitE, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1After spending way to much time on this than I should, I finally got the _real_ answer. And 99% of the people on here are wrong.
thegrinder hit the nail on the head with his link to the answer. http://www.amazeingart.com/fun/einstein-quiz-answer.html
I feel like such a dumbass for being in the 98%. - deto, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I got a different answer than most of you because "The green house is on the left of the white house" doen't necessarily mean next door. There are other clues that specifically say next door.
- Park708, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I meant rule 4, not 10
-
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