All Knowledge Is Contained ... Somewhere

[truepenny]

When I was a kid, I was addicted to a particular type of logic puzzle, the sort where they give you a list of people and a list of characteristics and a set of clues, and you figure out which person has which characteristic. I love those things, and I haven't seen one since I took the GRE.

The problem is, I don't know what they're called. The ones I was given as a child were called Mind Benders, but a quick Google proves that "mind bender" is used as a generic term for puzzle, like "brain teaser."

So, my question is: does anyone know what this particular type of puzzle is properly called? And does anyone know a good source for them?

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I love these things, too. I have no idea what they're called, though.

[blufive.livejournal.com]

[random stranger passing via friends-of-friends page]

Do you mean these (http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Plains/4484/logic.htm)?

In the UK, magazines full of them certainly used to be available bi-monthly in most decent newsagents, and I assume they still are.

The web page linked above lists several such American magazines. The list appears not to have been updated for years, so they may not exist any more (though some of them have been around for a couple of decades, which implies that at least some of them should still survive)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oooh, thank you, random stranger! You have just made my weekend.

Those are indeed they.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_swallow/]

I always heard them called just matrices, after the fact that the person-characteristic information is usually arrayed in a matrix.

[c-elisa.livejournal.com]

Dell at least is definitely still around; you can order a batch of random back issues cheaply here (http://www.dellmagazines.com/order/math.shtml). I see them on newsstands sometimes too, but it's a bit hit or miss.

I seem to get readdicted to these things about once every three years.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I loved those when I was a kid. In the back of the Penny Press "Variety Puzzles and Games," they had ads where you could send away for a whole pack of British logic puzzle magazines. I did them addictively.

The Einstein Riddle

[par-avion.livejournal.com]

Here is one that was being forwarded by email in 1999:

Rumor has it that Einstein wrote this riddle this century, and that he said that 98% of the world could not solve it.

(Take that with a large grain of salt, of course, but the riddle is fun).

Here is the challenge:

1. There are 5 houses in five different colors
2. In each house lves a person of a different nationality
3. These five owners drink a certain type of beverage, smoke a certain brand of cigar and keep a certain pet
4. No owners have the same pet, smoke the same brand of cigar or drink the same beverage.

The question to be answered solving this riddle is: Who owns the fish?

The Clues:

* 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 house's owner 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 horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill
* the owner 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

Re: The Einstein Riddle

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I hate these things, because as soon as I see them by brain starts asking "Why, why, why?" "What is the rock's motivation in this scene?"

Why is there a row of houses lived in by people of five different nationalities who all have pets? Why do they paint their houses different colours? Do they agree about what colours they're going to paint them? Do they argue? Has this caused huge fights about who has to have green, and who thought putting a red house next to it was a good idea so the one to the left is white as a compromise? What do they think of each other generally? What are their conversations like on the garden paths? Are they even on speaking terms? Do they cut each other dead and communicate only through notes about paint colours -- with very precise paint terms from those little number charts?

So by the time I am half-way through reading the puzzle, I've figured out a complicated rationale for the whole thing that's a lot more like five characters and some plot than it is like an answer to who has the poor fish -- who I am picturing as the fish from The Cat in the Hat trying to keep the peace among all these squabbling neighbours.

P.S. I have the answer to the question about why the people on the trains going in opposite directions would want to wave at each other, but would very much appreciate discovering why anyone has a bath with the plug out. I've been wondering this for the last thirty years.

[kate_nepveu]

Oh, I did those in school a lot. I would've done one for the end of the first Harry Potter book, except that people who'd already done it said you didn't have all the information you need.

This link is great, thank you--I foresee much timewasting in the future!

Re: The Einstein Riddle

[kate_nepveu]

"What is the rock's motivation in this scene?"

We just watched _Galaxy Quest_ last night, and there's actually a deleted scene on the DVD that extends that scene a bit. (Alan Rickman's character Alexander decides that the rock's motivation is getting rid of vibrations because rocks want to be still, and Tim Allen's character Jason thinks he's on to something so throws a rock behind him, at a cliff face; the rock monster bangs into the cliff face and crumbles, to cheering--and then comes back bigger and meaner than ever.)

Also, the DVD is dubbed in Thermian. No, really.

[liv]

I don't know what they're properly called; I always call them logic problems, which is hardly descriptive. But if you want some that are available online (Flash needed, I'm afraid), you can try the Puzzler website. They don't update all that often, once you've done the puzzles there it's probably not worth checking back for a couple of months at least. I recommend you also have a look at the so-called 'Japanese puzzles' or 'Tsunami'; they're newish, at least in this country, and most people who like the kind of logic puzzles you describe seem to find this variation fun.

Puzzler, by the way, are the best-quality publisher of puzzle magazines in the UK. With most word puzzles, I don't bother shelling out for ones that are well-written; a wordsearch, for example, is basically a wordsearch. But badly written logic problems are no fun at all, let alone badly proofread ones, ugh. So I'm a long time afficionado of Puzzler.

Re: The Einstein Riddle

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

I solved this one last night and was pleased with myself and with the world as a result.

Interestingly, it is also the second example (http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Plains/4484/lp9702.htm) on the page that blufive linked to, tho' with different nationalities and not attributed to Einstein.

[nestra.livejournal.com]

My main source for them was Games magazine, which one of my relatives must have had a subscription to, and I always heard them called "logic puzzles."