“Einstein’s Riddle” asks a simple question: Who owns the fish?SEE MORE: How Many Holes Does The Hat Have?
Legend has it that Albert Einstein made up this riddle when he was a kid.
Five houses painted five different colors stand in a row. One person of a different nationality lives in each house. The five home owners all drink some type of beverage, smoke a certain cigar brand, and have a certain kind of pet. But none of the owners drink the same beverage, smoke the same type of cigar, or have the same pet.
Using the 15 clues above, can you figure out who owns the fish?
LET’S ANALYSE THE CLUES ABOVE
The key to solving the riddle is to make a grid and start filling in what you know for sure about each house:
Start with the clues that you can immediately fill in on the grid. You know whoever lives in the center house drinks milk (clue number eight) and you know that the Norwegian lives in the first house (clue number nine).
Once you have those two squares filled in, you can use logic to fill in the rest. For example, clue 14 says the Norwegian lives next to the blue house. Since we already know the Norwegian lives in the first house, there’s only one house next to him. So house number two must be blue:
You can fill in much of the grid this way. Once you figure out who owns the horse though, things get tricky. At this point it’s helpful to label the rest of the empty boxes with all the remaining possibilities, and narrow it down from there.
Once you do that, you can see that water is the only possibility for house one. Then you can unravel the rest of the clues using the same deduction method as before.
ANSWER:
Eventually you’ll fill in all the squares and figure out that (drum roll…) the German in house number four owns the fish.