MENSA triangle riddle

[RussSchultz]

Your visual aid shows the effect much more dramatically.

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

Am I right?

 

[Simon F]

If you can't solve the riddle that "Einstein said only 2% of world population can solve it" does it make you popular?

By the way, what is that riddle?

This is it:

There are 5 houses in 5 different colours. In each house lives
a person with a different nationality. The 5 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.

The question is: Who owns the fish

Hints:
The Brit lives in the 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 homeowner 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 Blend lives next to the one who keeps cats.
The man who keeps the horse lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
The owner who smokes Bluemaster 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.

 

[Jabbah]

Goodie Goodie a decent brain teaser.

so would the answer be the german?

 

[TekkenMaster]

Yeah I got zee German as zee culprit as well.

This riddle is not so difficult if the hints/clues were presented in an order that allows you use deduction step by step.
The following ordering should make it easier

The Brit lives in the red house.
The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
The Dane drinks tea.
The Norwegian lives in the first house.
The Norwegian lives next to a blue house.
The green house is to the left of the white house.
The person that lives in the middle house drinks milk.
The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
The German smokes Prince.
The one that smokes Bluemaster drinks beer.
The owner of the green house drinks coffee.
The person that has a horse lives next to the one that smokes Dunhill.
The person that smokes Blend, has a neighbour that drinks water.
The person that smokes Pall Mall has a bird.
The person that smokes Blend, lives next to the one that has a cat.

This is not so much a riddle than trying to make sense of information overload.

 

[London Geezer]

Please resize the answers font to "tiny"!!! I wanna do this properly tonight when i get home

 

[Jabbah]

Please resize the answers font to "tiny"!!! I wanna do this properly tonight when i get home

Colours for dark background: #DEE3E7
Colours for light background: #EFEFEF

May make it esier to hide

 

[Basic]

I like Jabbah's version A LOT better than the irritating small text.
But it's even better with one modification, use white text inside a quote.
Then just mark the text to unhide it.

Hidden text example

 

[ninelven]

erased

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

Can someone please give me the answer to the first puzzle?

 

[Simon F]

I like Jabbah's version A LOT better than the irritating small text.
But it's even better with one modification, use white text inside a quote.
Then just mark the text to unhide it.

Hidden text example

An alternative is to install "rot-13 selection".

UPDATE: Actually, there is no installation at all. Just copy/bookmark the link marked "rot13" on this page

UPDATE 2: Arggh. That's a different version to the one I have and it's not as good. Sigh., If only I could paste the "link" here... but it's too long.

Gur fbyhgvba vf gung gur svfu vf bjarq ol gur trezna


I got bored solving it by hand a few years back and so wrote some C code, if anyone wants it. It should be general enough to solve a few of the typical puzzles

 

[Simon F]

Can someone please give me the answer to the first puzzle?

You'll regret not solving it yourself....

The two small triangles don't have the same slope... just look at the ratios of their heights to lengths. This means that the "Large triangles" are not triangles at all. In the top configuration, the shape bends in and in the bottom it bends out. The difference in area of those two bends, believe it or not, is equal to one grid square, hence the gap in the bottom figure

 

[Crisidelm]

Well, I think that Einstein (if he really did say that anyway) meant that only 2% of world population can solve it without using paper and pen (or any other "aid" alike), that is, mentally only.

 

[Simon F]

Well, I think that Einstein (if he really did say that anyway) meant that only 2% of world population can solve it without using paper and pen (or any other "aid" alike), that is, mentally only.

Are you sure? I can't imagine even 2% of the population could keep more than 8 facts in their short term memory at a time.

 

[London Geezer]

Well, I think that Einstein (if he really did say that anyway) meant that only 2% of world population can solve it without using paper and pen (or any other "aid" alike), that is, mentally only.

Are you sure? I can't imagine even 2% of the population could keep more than 8 facts in their short term memory at a time.

Sorry what?

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

Can someone please give me the answer to the first puzzle?

You'll regret not solving it yourself....

The two small triangles don't have the same slope... just look at the ratios of their heights to lengths. This means that the "Large triangles" are not triangles at all. In the top configuration, the shape bends in and in the bottom it bends out. The difference in area of those two bends, believe it or not, is equal to one grid square, hence the gap in the bottom figure

I already knew not every triangle is a triangle.
So that means the green and orange triangles phase shifted and caused the rift in the pichka?

 

[Basic]

An alternative is to install "rot-13 selection".

I knew I would get some good use of that rot-13 feature in EditPad.

I got bored solving it by hand a few years back and so wrote some C code, if anyone wants it. It should be general enough to solve a few of the typical puzzles

I solved it by hand a few years ago, but it wasn't fun enough to do it once more. So this time I did it in C. Woohaa!, 14 nested levels of for-loops. I think that's a personal record.

 

[Simon F]

I solved it by hand a few years ago, but it wasn't fun enough to do it once more. So this time I did it in C. Woohaa!, 14 nested levels of for-loops. I think that's a personal record.

My God! What approach did you take?

 

[Basic]

I realized that this was a solution to the problem (for those who likes programming), so I hid it:

Except for the first three realy trivial rules, it's basically one loop per rule, plus one "sign-loop" for each next-to rule. Full search with early pruning. Each loop tries to place a rule in the five different houses, and if it doesn't conflict with the outer loops/rules, goes on with next rule.

It might sound horribly ineffective, but the pruning does the job very well. The limiting factor seem to be how fast the program can printf the answer to the shell.

Oh, and as a bonus it's written in a code style that would scare off the most hardened code reviewer. Lots of nice macros. I think the speed comes from the lack of whitespace and comments.

 

[cristic]

I remember this puzzle, it was part of a Prolog assignment... 8)