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Sunday 2 August 2015

New solution to Einstein's puzzle - "Who owns the Zebra?" or "Who owns the fish?"

I was just solving, the so called Einstein puzzle. I don't know whether it is Einstein's or not but it is a good puzzle. 
As given in Wikipedia, it was called "Who owns the Zebra? - Puzzle".
The puzzle was given as follows, 

1. There are five houses.
2. The Englishman lives in the red house.
3. The Spaniard owns the dog.
4. Coffee is drunk in the green house.
5. The Ukrainian drinks tea.
6. The green house is immediately to the right of the ivory house.
7. The Old Gold smoker owns snails.
8. Kools are smoked in the yellow house.
9. Milk is drunk in the middle house.
10. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
11. The man who smokes Chesterfields lives in the house next to the man with the fox.
12. Kools are smoked in the house next to the house where the horse is kept.
13. The Lucky Strike smoker drinks orange juice.
14. The Japanese smokes Parliaments.
15. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.

Now, who drinks water? Who owns the zebra?
In the interest of clarity, it must be added that each of the five houses is painted a different color, and their inhabitants are of different national extractions, own different pets, drink different beverages and smoke different brands of American cigarets [sic]. One other thing: in statement 6, right means your right.
                                     — Life International, December 17, 1962

[Give some time to this puzzle and its previous solution and then scroll down to the end of this post for my new solution]

I don't know exactly, but I tried this for some 2 days. When I was travelling back to my home, I made some "hit and trial" between two choices to solve the puzzle. 
Surprisingly I got the answer with the given specifications. 
With too much joy, after reaching my home I just googled to check the answer.

Here is where I got the amazement. 

My answer is Different!!!

But it looks like it follows each and every rule. I was sure, my answer satisfies all the given conditions. 

When I checked the solutions, I found out the turning point. 

In the 11th, 12th and the 15th statement, it was used the word "next".
In the solution, "next" was used in the sense "to the right or the left". 

But I have been concluding that the fifth house and the first house could be thought as next to each other.

And my conclusion is not completely wrong because it was said in the first statement itself, there are only five houses considered.
So, I counted as the first house as the next house from the fifth one. 
Moreover it can be situated in a circular way.

Thus I end up with a new answer where the Norwegian owns the Zebra and drinks the water. 

Definitely, I believe it is a new solution. 

Away from this, there are other views such as, 
There needn't be Zebra and water. The solution can be some other things since it was never said that Zebra should be there in one of the houses. And there are some discussion on the words used in the puzzle and the way it was presented, which you can find it in the wikipedia.   

If those discussions are valid based on the words, then the above conclusion is also perfectly valid since it was never said that the houses should not be in a circular order. 


Thus I can justify my solution. 

The solution is 

For complete explanation - click Who owns the zebra solution

1 comment:

  1. but if you look at it this way, how would you know which one the "middle" house is?

    ReplyDelete

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