I just solved this one. Took me about an hour, though I think I could now do a similar problem much more quickly. It’s from Rosen’s “Discrete Mathematics with Applications” 6th Ed. I’m curious to see if others get the same answer as me!
Collaborations
Friends
Old Projects
Weiner Media
Weiner Only Projects
A classic problem. All you have to do is make charts. It’s basically Sudoku.
Pingback: Tweets that mention The Weinerworks » Einstein’s Zebra Puzzle -- Topsy.com
Well, I’ll send you what I got in a tweet because I don’t know how to do a spoiler box on this comment system.
Could be wrong so no real spoilers.
Mineral Water = Norwegian
Zebra = Englishman
Oops, my bad, Zebra = Japanese on my solution.
Have you ever had a Dell Magazine? They come out with puzzles just like this. Of course, I’m getting to work solving right away.
How about solving it without a chart (well, a written chart anyway)?
This is about the level of the questions on the LSAT ( law school application test) there is always an entire timed section of these questions.
SPOILERS BELOW
**
**
**
**
**
**
From the leftmost (#1) to rightmost (#5) houses:
#1 yellow house, Norwegian diplomat, fox, mineral water
#2 blue house, Italian physician, horse, tea
#3 red house, English photographer, snails, milk
#4 white house, Spanish violinist, dog, orange juice
#5 green house, Japanese painter, coffee, zebra
I did a lot of these puzzles back in elementary school. We were always given the charts used to find solutions, so I don’t much care to draw out the whole chart required for this one, especially considering there are six variables with five possible values involved.
But I never made any connection between these problems and discrete mathematics. How did this relate into the book?
Whipped up a spreadsheet in google with the answers, just to compare with y’all
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AtPQYZUPKcO6dFBpcFdZMHM1N1A0dFV4Vk5UbW9aOVE&hl=en&authkey=CMffnJ8M
Neat. I did a spreadsheet but I used colours to make fixed pairs (with grey as locked spaces). I just had to assemble the colour blocks like a puzzle.
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AtoaOz2DbtzedGVBRXNqMjIzOG96bEkxNnJfMmpUYnc&hl=en&authkey=CILOofMP
My HS physics teacher had my class solve this problem a few years back. A few of us managed it in about half an hour, and some couldn’t get it on their own. Ironically, the kid with the lowest grade in class, and worst critical thinking skills in general, solved it first. Whether he did it by luck or ability, I will never know.
Norwegian = Water
Japanese = Zebra
Steve owns the zebra.
Joe likes mineral water.
–JRM
Took me two tries. You make ONE mistake and it screws up the whole thing. Anyway, I’m pretty sure I got it right.
Mineral Water- Norwegian
Zebra- Japanese
There’s a puzzle game called Sherlock that is exactly these sort of puzzles. Can be found at http://www.kaser.com/ along with a bunch of other puzzle games more or less similar in various ways. I killed a lot of time while waiting a couple of weeks for my internet to be hooked up with these.
Took me 1 hour!
mineral water- norwegian
zebra- japanese
Aah, aalways loved these types of puzzles, been doing them since I was little, though I very rarely come across them nowdays, nice to take a mind warp back a few years.
My solution had everything right, except the fox wasn’t in the house next to the physician. Dang, time to try again.
I got the Norwegian drinks mineral water and the Japanese owns the zebra, too. Yiss!!
It didn’t take me thaaat long, but I did also assume that the zebra and water drinker wouldn’t be in the same house since that would be too easy, which in turn, made it much easier to solve!
Total time: About an hour and a half.
First try on a spreadsheet in google docs…didn’t work out too well. Second try, I used paper and tape to track the connections and got it in 15 minutes (minus all the cutting, writing and taping). I found it by playing around with the position of the physician and fox.
SPOILER (As if this hasn’t been spoiled already by the commenters above :/ ) A picture of my results:
http://twitpic.com/40r0be
Got the same answer as everyone above; took me about 2 minutes to get the mineral water part, and another 15 minutes to work out the rest. If you’re doing it with pen and paper, it’s fastest to make guesses at certain points and quickly see if it works out; if not, scrap it and restart.