Can you solve the HARDEST logic puzzle? The Einstein Riddle
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 ต.ค. 2024
- Legend says that Einstein invented this puzzle as a child. The following puzzle is adapted from the version in Life Magazine, 1962. Who drinks the water? And who owns the zebra?
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Einstein didn't write this. It was written by the Canadian in the purple house #6 who drinks beer, eats Skittles, and has a pigeon with a video camera strapped to its head.
Actually this type of puzzle is called a Logigram. The main brand of puzzles in the Netherlands (Denksport) has them just like sudoku's. Then you have dozens of them in one little booklet. Various difficulties too, so you can work your way up to harder ones and get increasingly advanced booklets.
yes i grew up with these in the UK where there were often one a week in the back of children's magazines, or you could buy booklets for parents to give to kids, i loved them
but i used to always see them in a different table format. so when the video first started my brain went to how to build that table for tick boxes
null house colour pet drink candy
1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5
house1
2
3
4
5
colour1
2
3
4
5
pet 1
2
3
4
5
drink1
2
3
4
5
candy1
2
3
4
5
once you have a tick in a box you can remove the column and row from everywhere else like suduko
Yes, drawing it out on a proper logic grid makes it much easier to solve.
What's the name of the booklet? Is it available in English?
@@ghstmn7320 you can find them with the suduko puzzles in WH Smiths
The main trick to those is to have a table for each attribute where you can cross the possibilities. That avoids having to duplicate the tables and crossing out the ones that are impossible like in the video.
I don't believe that Albert knew about Reeses, M&Ms, Snickers, and Kit Kats when he was a child.
He predicted them.
He was fibbing about time travel.
If you played Red Alert, the opening cut scene explains it all :P
It was adapted by Life Magazine. "It" as in "time" and not the "problem"
Respect to Daniel from México for helping Einstein experience our modern chocolates
All my facts are from Google, so guaranteed accurate. Einstein born in 1879. Logic puzzles attributed to Lewis Carroll in the 1880s. Most of the candies mentioned are from the 1920s and 30s. But I love logic puzzles and I really love the time travel theory.
*Reads thumbnail*
You're joking, right?
There has to be more to it, right?
Ah, 15 parts. Thank you.
My reaction exactly!
Everybody drinks water, and nobody owns a zebra. The zebra owns you.
It's just a standard logic puzzle, as found in many puzzle collection books. Draw the stepped grids, label them with the six categories, mark the matches and exclusions (ensuring they're replicated across all relevant grids - e.g. The first clue tells you that the Englishman doesn't live in any other coloured house, and no other nationality lives in the red house), and start filling in the table for each house / colour / nationality / pet / drink / confectionary.
All this problem needs is a pencil, paper, and more patience than I possess
Or very good visualization / memory!
Which almost nobody has@@fburton8
Or a common sense to know that water is drunk by everybody and does not count as a favorite beverage, and Zebra is not pet.
I did these all the time as a kid on rainy days (we didn't have nintendos back then and only 2 tv channels)
you had them in various difficulty levels
Dang, you're old. We had 4 channels when I was a kid.
Yes, and I bet you learnt a lot more that way than by playing with a Nintendo or watching TV.
@@Chris-hf2sl absolutely, I was a book wurm and I also played outside all the time, I think our tv time per week was maybe 2-4 hours . there just wasn't much worth watching anyway
Wasn't it about alcohol than beverages and cigarettes than candies?
I think so, but it's probably better for kids if we don't talk about those.
Sincerely, a 46yo alcoholic pothead.
(I quit cigarettes about 10 months ago though!🤷♂)
I distinctly remember that the German smoked Prince
We should swap the candy for fruit because candy is bad for you
The original puzzle referred to brands of cigarettes, rather than candies. All of the drinks were non-alcoholic.
@@danielhanson3733And I believe the animals were different. The question was "who owns the fish?"
This puzzle was reprinted in Reader's Digest, June 1963 edition, p. 24.
I made one of those full 5x5x5 logic puzzle type grids to solve it. Very satisfying!
Wouldn't be enough - need 5x5x5x5x5.
Same, I made a grid in excel like those logic puzzles in the magazines and eventually worked it out
@@fifiwoof1969 However many 5s 😂 I made a full grid, basically
@@BlackFiresong you said 3 lots of 5 was full - I merely pointed out that it wasn't.
You need 15 5x5 blocks, arranged in a triangle :
B B B B B
B B B B
B B B
B B
B
where each B is a 5x5 block.
To solve it? I do not have the energy to even read it😂
Doing separate grids makes a lot more sense... I ended up doing the first letter of each group per section, it was messy, but got there in the end.
On paper, it can help to limit solving to one grid. I think it also helps to alphabetize the variables in each cell, black out false options as you identify them, and circle a cell’s correct answer so it stands out. The first thing you should do after finding any cell’s answer is make sure that option is blacked out in every other cell.
I really like the technique of a triangle of grids, where you can connect any pairwise connection to any other.
Same xD
Took longer but was also more challenging ;)
I remember this as a kid, although the countries and candies are different.
Dear Presh, I have no words to express my appreciation for the way you create the placeholder videos that run at the same speed of your speech delivery without which your explanations could more than easily go above the head.. What more - the importance of the same for a puzzle such as this can never be exaggerated...
SOME PERSONAL HSTORY: I always love logical puzzles and scour different sources for the same. I came across this puzzle more than 25 years ago in some local magazine. I could have solved it but for my patience / discipline.. 🙂
I try solving this problem every couple of years (so that I forget the answer), and it's the first time I actually solved it!
I am a 14-year-old from India. I really like solving these kinds of puzzles and I waited for 2 months to get sufficient time after my examinations to solve this puzzle. It took me a long time: over an hour perhaps, but it was really fun and rewarding to solve. Thank you Presh for sharing this amazing puzzle.
I remember doing this a few years back, it's a fun one
when i first saw this puzzle it said something along the lines of "if you solve it you're smarter than 99% of people in the world" so i tried and succedeed, but in reality anyone can solve it you just need a LOT of patience and some logical thinking
very few people have lot of patience. also very few people has logical thinking
I've heard a variation of thism, also dubbed the "Einstein" riddle, but it was someone stole a fish and you needed to solve the riddle to find the culprit. You had 5 people in 5 houses, each house was a different color, each person a different nationality, each had a different pet (including the stolen fish), preferred a certain type of cigar, and certain type of drink. By using all the hints, you were able to logic who in which house is the thief that stole the fish.
"The girl I used to love eats Kit Kats" - Pete Townshend.
This puzzle looks very complicated at first, but it just requires the right method, a lot of patience and some logic.
I was making good progress until I hit a contradiction. I'm tired and didn't feel like redoing my work, so I just viewed your solution.
Please make video on Gödel's incompleteness theorem
The following answer is also logically sound:
1. Everyone drinks water and it is not considered a beverage.
2. Beverage of the Norwegian remains unknown.
3. Nobody has zebra as a pet. They are difficult to handle.
4. The pet of the Japanese remains unknown.
thinking "out of the grid / box" ;-)
and (as a question of intelligente) it may be the quickest answer without "calculating"...
is there any person on the earth who never drinks water?
is there any person on this earth with a Zebra as a pet?
I love these kinds of logic puzzles. Where could we find more of them?
These logic puzzles come in large books with all possible grids supplied. They are fun to work through.
Yeah Often sold in airport book shops.
I remember spending like 1-2 hours on this when I was a teenager. Felt very proud when I solved it. But felt even prouder when I figured out that I can use Excel to have easy to fill in grids.
Excel is a fantastic piece of software. You can do just about anything with it. In the late 60's, long before Excel or any spreadsheets were invented, I use to do the (UK) Sunday Times Brainteaser puzzle every week. On one occasion, I programmed a minicomputer at work to solve the puzzle. Just as it was printing the answer, the telephone rang, so I was distracted. As I was answering the call, I was surprised to hear the printer working again. When I checked after the call was over, I saw that the computer had found a second solution, but one that was clearly not the one intended.
Wow!..this was amazing! I don't know whether the question or answer was more difficult to create.
Wow - that was brilliant! Thanks. And you made it so simple to understand!
4:40 -- *WRONG.*
You can already easily deduce that *house #1 is YELLOW* and Kit-Kat's are eaten there, *AS WELL AS that there's a Horse in #2 !! :)*
*THAT'S how far I got before having to branch-out !!*
In general, I think this is a worse version of the original puzzle, because in the OG version, you DON'T have to branch out -- it's pure logic, without the guesswork!! :)
.
I enjoyed this puzzle, I went through the clues a little differently but got to the same answer. I only used 1 grid but I made notes for the possible options for each space and when a clue canceled something out I removed it as an option for that space. It's a pretty similar tactic just handled a little differently.
Snickers first appeared in 1930, Kit Kats in 1935, and M&M's in 1941. Einstein was born in 1879 and would have been over 50 when Snickers and Kit Kats first appeared, and over 60 when M&Ms first appeared. Pretty clear that *if* Einstein invented this fairly run of the mill logic puzzle, it wouldn't have been in his childhood.
That was soooooo satisfying
Everett Kaser's classic puzzle game "Sherlock" is basically this, but with more clue sets (with unique solutions) than you can shake a stick at, and an intuitive GUI. His other games are just as good.
Yeah Skittles came out in 1974. And I believe M and M's in 1941. Einstein was born in 1879. So this couldn't possibly be true unless he was also an incredible psychic.
Actually, I think that every person drinks water because it is a crucial necessity of all the people. So including it as a separate beverage drunk by a person doesn't sound right.
For the Zebra answer though, I will go with your answer. Nice solution 👍
I think it could be "who drinks water *exclusively* .*
@@wyattstevens8574 Maybe, or some other beverage like apple juice could have worked as well
I figured out first half of the answer and had some of the information written down. Then I watched the video up to the point where you set up the first two grids. And looking at them I figured out the rest of the riddle.
For the solve, I basically started with what we knew and wrote it all down, as well as a number 1-5, with ??? in place of each empty spot. Then I started slowly working through each clue, checking it with what is known, and finding where it could fit, until I started finding things that could only be in one spot. I won't go into detail on that, as it would be massive paragraphs of text, but I ended up with: #, Nationality, Color, Pet, Candy, Drink
House 1: Norwegian, Yellow, Fox, KitKat, Water
House 2: Ukrainian, Blue, Horse, Cadbury, Tea
House 3: Englishman, Red, Snails, M&M, Milk
House 4: Spaniard, Ivory, Dog, Snickers, OJ
House 5: Japanese, Green, Zebra, Reese's, Coffee
My first instinct is that everyone drinks water, and no one can own a zebra.
There was no way I'd be able to solve this right now, though I absolutely delighted in listening along 😆😆
Using MS Excel I was able to work this out on my own. Nice puzzle!
I thought it was some some trick question. So i initially answered with everyone drinks water because everyone needs to and no one owns a zebra because it isnt a traditionally domesticated animal.
Haha, nice way of thinking though
All these duplicate grids using guess-and-check seems very inefficient. I just used a standard logic puzzle grid, and I solved it fine. I was also able to eliminate more than half the clues right away which meant a lot less to sift through.
To people sayinb he couldn’t have known about the candies - this is the original riddle
There are five houses in a row, each with a different color. In each house lives a person of a different nationality. The five owners drink a certain type of 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 beverage. We have to find out each of the respective persons with their respective belongings.
The Brit lives in the red house.
The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
The Dane drinks tea.
The greenhouse is on the immediate left of the white house.
The owner of the greenhouse drinks coffee.
The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds.
The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
The man living in the center house drinks milk.
The Norwegian lives in the first house.
The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
The man who keeps the horse lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
The man who smokes Blue Master drinks beer.
The German smokes Prince.
The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water
This form of logic problem can be solved in one grid just by using the grid slightly differently. The grid design is the same you used with one axis providing a known (house numbers) and the other axis showing the other classes of variable. You should also next fill any grid cells you have answers for, like Norway in House 1.
Here’s where it gets different: Next fill up the remaining grid cells with all of its remaining class options. For example, use BGIRY for colors in every Color cell. To solve, just delete or cross off the omitted options. The later logic jumps on the grids may be harder to see using just on grid, but I got the right answer. I think it’s much easier to keep track of all the info on one grid when solving on paper - and I tend to do these puzzles that way.
Is burgergeld enough for the tea only? 😂
I still have a few logic puzzle books when I want to free my brain from the mush of social media!
Start with Clues 10 & 15
Norwegian lives in home 1, which is next to the blue house. This means the blue house is home 2.
By clue 6, this eliminates green and ivory as colors for home 1 (as home 2 is blue). By clue 2, this also eliminates red as the color for home 1 (as the resident of home 1 is not the Englishman). This means the Norwegian lives in the yellow house.
By clue 8, the Norwegian eats Kit-Kats, and by clue 12, lives next to where the horse is kept.
(this is just Part 1)
Well Done, Professor.
Your method is so much more visually neat than what I did, lol!
I got Water no problem but Zebra took me way too long get (and I cheated by *spoilers below*
being meta and assuming the Norwegian wasn't going to be the answer for both so it made for an easy spot to place the Fox)
I wonder if ChatGPT is able to solve a riddle like this.
maybe-maybe not, we all know how the 4 glass turning puzzle went....
Thanks for solving the problem visually. I wonder whether the AI (ChatGPT and others) can solve the riddle so easily.
I love how you pronounced it as 'meHico'
Very impressive deduction. How would this work out if the houses were arranged in a circle, with house 1 and 5 next to each other?
Then we'd need an additional clue(s) in order to make the solution unique. Otherwise, there would be at least two possible solutions; namely the one in the video, as well as the following:
House 1: yellow, Norway, zebra, water, KitKat
House 2: red, England, horse, orange juice, Snickers
House 3: ivory, Spain, dog, milk, Cadbury
House 4: green, Japan, fox, coffee, Reese's
House 5: blue, Ukraine, snails, tea, M&Ms.
==> The Norwegian drinks water and also owns the zebra.
Done. Haven't worked one of those in almost 30 years.
Too bad this wasn't about cigar brands. The puzzle made me want to go out and consume zebras and dogs. Oh well.
This was done to make it more family-friendly.
Imagine how they’re using your data. This is exactly why you see those ads
If you have ever read anything about Einstein as a person, it would be clear to you such riddle could not have orignated from him. He simply didn't like long yada yada yada talks but rather prefered getting straight to the point
Please check! I used a slightly different approach to solve this problem. I think it is correct. I set up the matrix with the possibles. Very convenient that they all the start with a different letter! Statements 9, 10 & 15 give a direct answer. Statement 6 eliminates green as a colour for House 1.
From there I went through all the remaining statements noting which Houses they would be valid for. Statement 4 was the most vulnerable as it was valid in only Houses 4&5. I then subtracted Houses 4&5 from all the other Statement's valids and found Statement 2 must be true in House 3 & Statement 5 must be true in House 2. Easy solve from there. I think this approach is logically correct but, again, please check. It does roughly parallel the sequence of what Presh was doing.
"4. Coffee is drunk in the green house". At first I was confused. I thought there was a person that his name was "Coffee" and was drunk in the green house lol. But after I kept watching, as soon I heard that "milk is drunk in home 3", I realized that he was using the word "drunk" as a past tense of drink instead of being drunk lol.
Interesting how demonyms that end with the suffix “-n” don’t sound offensive when used as a singular noun, but those that end with the suffix “-ese” do.
Very systematically done
Brilliant!!
Feels like something solvable with matrices.
If you like this type of puzzle, there is an old DOS game called Sherlock which works along the same lines. I spent way, way too much time playing it.
The Spaniard owns a dog, but does he own a doghouse?
Actually, we are not told that anyone drinks exactly one beverage. It's very likely for example that in every house water is sometimes drunk.
The most likely answer to who owns the zebra is "the nearby zoo".
These puzzles baffled me until back in the 70s i figured out yhe grid system.. But I would do it in reverse, for instance if the swede drank water I would x out water for other countries and beverages for the swede. Your way seems mor efficient as it requires only a few multidimensional grids.
Brillante.
M&Ms were invented in WWII when Einstein was in his 60s, so i doubt he invented this riddle as a kid
The original(?) version had cigarettes instead, which makes a bit more sense.
He predicted them.
hey Presh, 6 years ago "you" asked "how old is the captain?"
why is it now ok to deduce that
(only) one of the people drinks water ?
one of the people has a Zebra as a pet ?
(and the Houses are numbered in order 1 to 5
with 1 at the left and 5 at the right side...
or 5 at the left and 1 at the right side ?)
funny fact the Houses in numerical order leads to the same "Answer" (norway = water, Japan = Zebra) either if it's 1-5 or 5-1 ;-)
Okay, I appreciate your method but there is a way to construct this without resorting to multiple different tables. Make a grid to hold your information. Then you could place "Spaniard owns the dog" without needing to know that the Spaniard or the dog are in house 4. I only used hypothesis once while solving it and that's cause I caught something that was either "horse is owned by the tea drinking Ukrainian" or "horse is owned by the orange juice drinking Japanese who likes both Snickers and Reese's" if I hadn't caught that I probably could have solved it without hypothesis. And I definitely wouldn't bed another board.
I got tripped up by the word "the" in clue 12: "THE house next to the house where the horse is kept" means there is only one house next to the house with the horse meaning the horse should be in house 1 or house 5. It turned out that there were two houses next to the house with the horse which was in house 2. So the clue should have been "KitKats are eaten in A house next door to the house with the horse."
pretty big assumption that water and zebra are included. Could just as easily say "whoever said anything about water and zebra?"
The Time Warp of Dr. Brain: Brain Waves
I've heard an alternative to the solution which is more of a logical answer. And that is that there is no answer to the riddle because you can't be 100% certain the Japanese actually owns the zebra. He might have another pet which isn't a zebra. However, since there are many versions of this question, that answer doesn't always make sense, so I'm not sure if it's correct
Except that the wording of the initial setup excludes that possibility. We already know from the start that there are 5 different pets, and we know which animals they are. By the time we get to that last step all the other pets have been placed elsewhere. Edit: In the context of the puzzle, the fact that one of them is a Zebra is implied by the question itself.
Since it's asked for the zebra, not a zebra, means the zebra is part of the the animal set.
I solved it using the grid method, and got the answer Norwegian drinks water and Japanese owns a zebra.
This was a great one
How can 50 cows can be tied on 9 pillers with an odd number on each piller
I'll give it a try.
Pillars 1 through 8 each have 5 cows
Pillar 9 has 10 cows
5 is an odd number, and only one pillar has 10 cows, so 10 is the "odd number out"
It works in English anyway 😁
I don't know, but if it had been about filling 9 bags with 50 ping-pong balls, such that each bag contains an odd number of ping-pong balls, then one solution is this:
Fill seven bags with seven ping-pong balls each. Put these seven bags into the eighth bag. Fill the ninth bag with the one remaining (50th) ball.
Did you consider that just because the houses are lined up in a row, and they are numbered 1-5, that they're not necessarily in numerical order?
I'm sure you can come up with a different solution when the houses are marked 23514 or 13542.
irrelevant...you'l. end up on a wild goose chase
I solved Einstein's Riddle years ago, however instead of candy( brands of cigars ); found it surprisingly straightforward?
Why didn't you use the other type of grid with many more lines, and just ticks and crosses? rather than duplicating the outcome grid multiple times?
2:55 "(a snail) fox horse"
A few month ago I wrote a program in c# to solve this type of puzzle in my lunch break :D
Looking at the thumbnail, I thought that if only the information provided is considered, no resident drinks water because beverages are usually defined to be all drinks except water. And then the zebra question would have also been some kind of technicality like it’s not traditionally a pet. Though I realize that questions about semantics are not really this channel’s style.
Okay but nothing guarantees that the unreferenced pet is the zebra nor that the last beverage is water. Maybe the last house has a chameleon and the other one drinks apple juice. For me, rigorously, we cannot know the drink and the pet of the houses where they are not referenced.
Basically it is a sudoku
I also thought sudoku, but it also is very similar to wood puzzles where you have to fit all the pieces together. The data binds 2 attributes to form blocks and the can only fit in one way.
Of course in this adaption, the water drinker is Norwegian who has a fox, and the zebra belongs to the only non-european.
The funny part is that I used one grid and figured out house 1 completely in only 4 steps. The rest took longer.
This looks a lot like a Sudoku problem grid. 😀
The text of the thumbnail image says: (each owns different pets) Pluralis,(Pets) different,,, compared to what the neighbor has, or what the home owner himself has? In conclusion, everyone drinks water and has a Zebra
I used geopolitics to see who would wanna live next to whom. Almost got the nationalities right.
Can you prove Einstein's biggest puzzle : E=MC^2 ?
This riddle reminds me of solving sodoku puzzles.
What is wrong with everyone's patience? I sat down, created a grid, and solved it first try. It's not hard, just takes some time.
I've encountered this at a logic puzzle website. This was 2000's. Difficult but managed to solve after two days. Satisfying. Presently i don't know how. 😂 Can't remember.
I just skipped through the video to the end and now I'm even more confused 💀💀💀
I lost my patience, after I thought I had to make separate cases (grids).
It was all becoming too much for me and I just couldn't do it anymore. I hope that I would have solved this till the end just to enjoy the satisfaction of solving this problem but alas!
spreadsheets are great tools, that was the answer i came up with.