Category: Brain Teasers

A collection of Math, Chess, Detective, Lateral, Insight, Science, Practical, and Deduction puzzles, carefully curated by Puzzle Prime.

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Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of relativity. His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. He is best known to the general public for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation". He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Einstein’s Puzzle

Section: Brain Teasers Category: Deduction
Difficulty:

There are 5 houses and each of them has a different color. Their respective owners have different heritages, drink different types of beverages, smoke different brands of cigarettes, and look after different types of pets. It is known that:

  1. The Brit lives in the red house.
  2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
  3. The Dane drinks tea.
  4. Looking from in front, the green house is just to the left of the white house.
  5. The green house’s owner drinks coffee.
  6. The person who smokes Pall Malls raises birds.
  7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
  8. The man living in the center house drinks milk.
  9. The Norwegian lives in the leftmost house.
  10. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
  11. The man who keeps a horse lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
  12. The owner who smokes Bluemasters also drinks beer.
  13. The German smokes Prince.
  14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
  15. The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.

The question is, who owns the pet fish?

The German owns the pet fish.

Since the Norwegian lives in the leftmost house (9) and the house next to him is blue (14), the second house must be blue. Since the green house is on the left of the white house (4), the person living in the center house drinks milk (8), and the green house’s owner drinks coffee (5), the fourth house must be green and the fifth one must be white. Since the Brit lives in the red house (1) and the Norwegian lives in the leftmost house (9), the leftmost house must be yellow and the center house must be red. Therefore, the colors of the houses are: YELLOW, BLUE, RED, GREEN, WHITE.

Since the Norwegian from the yellow house smokes Dunhill (7), the man from the blue house must keep a horse (11). The person smoking Blends cannot be in the red house, because this would imply that the person in the green house keeps cats and the Swede keeps dogs in the white house (2, 10). However, in this case the Dane must be drinking tea in the blue house (3) and the person smoking Blends does not have a neighbor drinking water (5), which is a contradiction (15). Also, the person smoking Blends cannot be in the green house, because this would imply that the person in the white house drinks water (15), the Dane lives in the blue house (3), and the German and the Swede live in the last two houses. Since the German smokes Prince (13) and the Swede keeps dogs (2), there is nobody who could smoke Bluemaster and drink beer (12). The person smoking Blends cannot be in the white house either, because this would imply that the person in the green house drinks water (15), when in fact he drinks coffee (5).

Therefore, the person smoking Blends must be in the blue house, and then the German and the Swede must live in the last two houses (2, 13). Since the person who smokes Bluemasters drinks beer (12), this must be the Swede with his dogs in the white house (2). The only option for the person who smokes Pall Mall and raising birds (6) is the red house. Then the Norwegian must keep cats (10) and the German is left with the pet fish in the green house.

albert-einstein
Albert Einstein October 24, 2020
0 Comments

Thief

Section: Brain Teasers Category: Insight
Difficulty:

A woman was standing in her hotel room, when somebody knocked on the door. When she opened the door, there was a man who said that he has mistaken his door, apologized, and continued down the corridor. When the woman closed the door, she called security to warn them about the thief. Why did she think the man was planning to rob her?

If the man really thought this was his room, he wouldn’t have knocked on the door.

unknown-author
Unknown Author October 15, 2020
2 Comments

Close the Loop

Section: Brain Teasers Category: Mathematics
Difficulty:

Alex and Bob are playing a game. They are taking turns drawing arrows over the segments of an infinite grid. Alex wins if he manages to create a closed loop, Bob wins if Alex does not win within the first 1000 moves. Who has a winning strategy if:

a) Alex starts first (easy)
b) Bob starts first (hard)

Remark: The loop can include arrows drawn both by Alex and Bob.

In both cases, Bob wins. An easy strategy for part a) is the following:

Every time Alex draws an arrow, Bob draws an arrow in such a way that the two arrows form an L-shaped piece and either point towards or away from each other. Since every closed loop must contain a bottom left corner, Alex cannot win.

For part b), Bob should use a modification of his strategy in part a). First, he draws a horizontal arrow. Then, he splits the remaining edges into pairs, as shown in the image below. If Alex draws one arrow on the grid, then Bob draws its paired arrow, such that the two arrows point either towards or away from each other. The only places where a loop can have a bottom left corner are where Bob drew the first arrow or the grid points directly above it. However, if a loop has a bottom left corner there, then it is easy to see that it must have at least one more bottom left corner elsewhere, which is impossible. 

unknown-author
Unknown Author October 12, 2020
0 Comments

One to One Hundred

Section: Brain Teasers Category: Mathematics
Difficulty: Tags:

99 unique numbers between 1 and 100 are listed one by one, with 5 seconds pause between every two consecutive numbers. If you are not allowed to take any notes, what is the best way to figure out which is the missing number?

Keep up adding the given numbers and remember only the last two digits of the sum. In the end, if the result is less than 50, subtract it from 50. If the result is larger than 50, subtract it from 150. This method works because the sum of all numbers from 1 to 100 is 5050, so if you know the sum of all the listed numbers, you will know the missing number as well.

unknown-author
Unknown Author September 6, 2020
0 Comments

Two Lost Cards in a Deck

Section: Brain Teasers Category: Practical
Difficulty:

Below you can read the steps of a magic trick, as well as a video of its live performance. Your goal is to figure out how the trick is done, then perform it for your friends and challenge them to figure out the trick themselves.

  1. Take out from your pocket a deck of cards, which is visibly shuffled.
  2. Ask your first assistant to cut the deck, then take the top card from the bottom pile of cards and memorize it.
  3. Ask your second assistant to take the next card from the bottom pile and memorize it.
  4. Ask your first assistant to return his card back on the top of the bottom pile, then ask your second assistant to do the same.
  5. Place the two piles of cards on top of each other and cut the deck multiple times.
  6. Split the deck into two piles of cards, dealing consecutively one card on the left, then one card on the right, and so on, until you run out of cards.
  7. Take one of the two piles of cards, look at it, and guess correctly what cards were chosen by your assistants.

How does the magic trick work? Below you can see a live performance of the magic trick from Penn and Teller’s show Fool Us.

The secret of the trick is to memorize the group of cards which are located in even positions and the group of cards which are located in odd positions in the original deck. An easy way for doing this is to split the cards into two groups, such that the cards in the first group are only spades and diamonds, and the cards in the second group are only clubs and hearts.

When the two assistants pick their cards and then return them back into the deck, the order of the cards is reversed. When you split the original deck into two piles (even after cutting it several times), each of the piles will contain a card which should not be there. For example, the group of spades and diamonds will contain one clubs card, and the group of clubs and hearts will contain one diamonds card. These two cards are the ones which were picked by the assistants.

siegfried-tiber
Siegfried Tiber September 3, 2020
5 Comments

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