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

Who owns the Zebra? - solution [Who owns the fish?]

I will just try to put forward my justification about the solution in various point of views as follows..

First of all, the solution for the question is given below..

The first simple argument is..

Ø It was considered only five houses. Whether there are other houses or not is not our concern.

Ø Only the five houses are examined. And “next” means here the soonest occasion after the present. And it needn’t to be the immediately right place from the present.

*Moreover next doesn’t say anything about left or right.

Ø The reason is because, in Statement 6, it was stated separately the word “immediately to the right”.

Thus, it permits you to consider the first house as the house next to the fifth house.

Hence the given solution satisfies all the 15 descriptive statements.

Away from this, there are also other ways of viewing this problem.  

Ø It was never mentioned anything about the order in which the houses should be arranged. It could be in any order.

Ø But the statement 9 states that there should be a middle house. Middle is the place where if you start to count symmetrically, there won’t be any house left. It means you can pair simultaneously two houses from both directions.

In dictionary meaning it is equivalent to say - the point or position at an equal distance from the sides, edges, or ends of something. 

It rules out many possible orders but not every order. There is still something left to argue. One of them is a circular order (you can choose X order – one at center and four at the corners. But I choose circular).

You may ask what the middle term in the circular order. But that depends on the way you choose to start the counting. If you start like this,

You can choose 3^rd house as the middle.

But in circular order, you can choose any one of them as the middle. There is nothing wrong with that. But it just should satisfy statement 10 i.e. you should start with Norwegian’s house.

And also in some other way, if you choose to peck the order as follows,

You can see Green house is to the left of the ivory house. (From the answer it is known that the 4^th house is Green and the 3^rd is ivory). But it is against the comment 6, where Green should be on the immediate right of ivory.

But we just don’t care about those possibilities since we just need one single solution fulfills the given specifications.  

Whether there are more than one solution exists or not is not a big deal. It would just be some other approach.

It may give new answers or it could go wrong!‼

Nevertheless from this solution we can just conclude that there are other possible answers for this puzzle. And this puzzle doesn’t have a unique solution.

Thus we can prove there may be more than one solution for the puzzle, Who own the Zebra?

In fact, there are many other solutions in circular order. 

Solution:2

Solution:3