Took me a while, but I got it right first time. Huzzah!

Its an easy problem in general. I've done a lot like it but with less answers to figure out. Unfortunately it took a couple of minutes because I generally hate problems that require me to actually write things down.

crudus:

Eric the Orange:

crudus:
rather easy problem that can be solved by brute force alone (that is computing brute force). and 13 people (especially ones on message boards which will get you a volunteer bias more than likely) is not a good representative sample. Though I will admit that 2% is rather low.

Really? Well you people are smarter than me then. I consider myself quite logical and it took me around an hour to figure it out.

as for the 3 out of 13, I just stated that as the reason I decided to start this thread, because it obviously wasn't 2%, so I wanted to see what kind of percentage I get. It's entirely possible that only people who could figure it out will answer the question and ones who could not will ignore it, making the results lie far more heavily on the yes side than they normally would.

I didn't say that I took one look at it and got it right away. I said that it just required time. There is no twist to it, there is no think out of the box, just do it. Yes, what you described is the "volunteer bias" in your "representative sample"(aside from the fact that 13 people on a message board isn't enough to represent for 6 billion people).

Of coarse you could go the other way with it and take the amount of people who said yes on this poll, out of the amount of people who have accounts on the escapist. That wouldn't be accurate either because a lot of those people won't see this thread. Assuming they couldn't answer it would tilt the average unfairly in the no direction.

ae86gamer:
I own the pet fish. Problem solved. :D

_{OT: I tried it and got it wrong.}

I wish answers like that were allowed, everything would be so much easier
. _{Me too, but that may be because I can't be bothered and give up halfway through...}

lol Got it. I screwed up where the colors go but still got it. Which is weird Cause i failed the first time and got the colors right but wanted to rush i guess lol.

I remember that kind of question on the LSAT... And hating it.

Actually, Einstein's is a bit easier than the LSAT questions. Any logic game like this with a definite set up, where there's only one possible answer, are much easier than some of the crap they pull on the LSAT.

I still have nightmares

Yeah, I did solve it. Hooray, I'm intelligent.

Got it without much difficulty, but it does take *quite* a bit of time (20 minutes, maybe? It is nearly 4am here, though...). Being armed with basic logic is enough to solve it, but I'm sure that the large proposed statistic comes more from people being unwilling to spend the effort, or from self-doubt.

dududf:
I have a better answer though, it doesn't mention Fish in the clues, so how do we know the guy didn't have a pet tiger?

The question just states "Who has the Fish" But neither confirms or denies the existence of the fish.

I noticed this too; I must admit, my first instinct was to probe the clues for signs of a trick question. Glad to see that it didn't involve one; the problem is more lasting as a straightforward logic problem. (Not unique, but useful regardless of context.)

yeah I got it took me a while though.

This is really easy with a pen and paper, just go with hunches once in a while and make sure its a pencil not an eraser.

Doing it in your head though, thats a different story.

It's a trick question.
It was Col. Mustard in the ballroom with the lead pipe.

I got it, took me ten minutes but I got it.

I must admit I enjoyed that immensely (mainly cause my older brother didn't get it hehe).

I also got it. I did a similar puzzle recently, not quite as complicated, but a quick chart makes it all come together in minutes. I also think 2% is low, but perhaps not for the time. How many people had a college education in the early part of the 20th century? How many of those had any experience in logic? It might still be low, but not as ridiculous as it is now.

Or maybe smart people hang out with smart people. Hmm...

I sort of looked over it, process of elimination'd 3 of them and then just sort of made an educated guess and got it right. I'm sure if I cared enough to actually connect all this stuff on paper then I would've gotten it anyways, but right now I could really care less. so Einstein can suck my ballage, because I half assed my way into the 2% of the world that can do concrete reasoning.

PoisonUnagi:
Einstien was actually quite a fucktard... people claim he discovered E=MC2, but his idea was E=MC3. Isaac Newton corrected about half of his theorums.

E = M * c^3 / c^(c - V)

This begs the question of how much energy a tachyon has.

yes after a few minutes but i needed to scribble my thoughts on a piece of paper

PoisonUnagi:
Einstien was actually quite a fucktard... people claim he discovered E=MC2, but his idea was E=MC3. Isaac Newton corrected about half of his theorums.

I'm going to assume that either this is a tongue-in-cheek joke, or you phrased it wrong and it was retrospectively proved that Einstein was wrong.

I really, really hope that's the case.

Douk:
This is really easy with a pen and paper, just go with hunches once in a while and make sure its a pencil not an eraser.

Doing it in your head though, thats a different story.

A lot of people are saying that this was easy, which makes me feel kinda silly. Maybe it's because I haven't done a logic puzzle in a while but I thought it was pretty difficult, and it took me a while to get through it.

Either that or people are saying they "could not be arsed" so to speak. So maybe my poll options should have been yes and I don't care.

somelameshite:
Managed to solve it in 20 minutes without writing it down, too lazy to get some paper. I must say that was quite a challenge .

Really, wow. Do you have a photographic memory, cause I know I couldn't remember all the the different information.

grimsprice:

PoisonUnagi:
Einstien was actually quite a fucktard... people claim he discovered E=MC2, but his idea was E=MC3. Isaac Newton corrected about half of his theorums.

Lolwut. Isaac Newton died over a century before Einstein was born...

He's trolling. Let him sit in the corner.

Eric the Orange:
So in the most recent Alt+Escape ( http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/alt-escape/6748-Alt-Escape-Cat-Got-Los ) this logic puzzle was mentioned.

http://www.brain-fun.com/Brain-Teasers/EinsteinsRiddle.php

In which it said that Einstein predicted that only 2% of people could figure it out. Now at least 3 of the 13 people that commented in that thread said they figured it out. Which is obviously higher than 2%.

So what I'm interested in seeing is what kind of percentage of people in the escapist community can figure it out. I would appreciate it if you answered honestly without cheating and didn't give away the answer to others.

Jesus these puzzles are simple if you set them out properly... i have done several of Einstein's puzzles in the past in only ten mins... Using excell

We did this in our computer class. With the help of Excel, it's pretty easy.

I managed to work it out in about 20 minutes with a whiteboard and plenty of patience. Once you've worked out the right order of houses, it's more or less smooth sailing from there.

I learnt how to do all this in physics. if cant you split up all the knowledge your told from a question then physics wont be your subject.

I gave up before even finishing reading the question. So I think I failed.

I had to map it out.. there's no way I could do it in my head, but I did figure it out.

bright blue squares/lines are MOST of the "These things are right" choices..

once you map them all out, it's just a matter of figuring out how they fit together.

I didn't try it because I didn't have paper handy, I did however do the cat thing with ease.

Took me about an hour trying to watch Smallville at the same time, but I got it. I also learned how to set it up in a logic class in elementary school though. So it's not impressive. A person with no training who figured out how to do it from scratch has much more proof of intelligence, I think.

ah, it's been awhile since I've done one of these. Well, I'll try it out.

Edit: Got it right! That wasn't so tough.

The thing where "The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water" messed me up for a while. I couldn't decide if it meant that the Blends smoker lived next to the water drinker or whether it meant the Blends smoker merely wasn't the water drinker. I ended up going with the leap to saying he lived next to the water drinker. I got down to two possible fish owners before I absolutely had to commit.

Lord Monocle Von Banworthy:
The thing where "The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water" messed me up for a while. I couldn't decide if it meant that the Blends smoker lived next to the water drinker or whether it meant the Blends smoker merely wasn't the water drinker. I ended up going with the leap to saying he lived next to the water drinker. I got down to two possible fish owners before I absolutely had to commit.

Altorin:

Lord Monocle Von Banworthy:
The thing where "The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water" messed me up for a while. I couldn't decide if it meant that the Blends smoker lived next to the water drinker or whether it meant the Blends smoker merely wasn't the water drinker. I ended up going with the leap to saying he lived next to the water drinker. I got down to two possible fish owners before I absolutely had to commit.

Spoilered for people who haven't finished it yet

Yeah, mine was more of a complaint about a bad clue than trying to give anyone a hint. Your method sounds a little different from mine. Cool.

This really wasn't that hard, as long as you use pen and paper. Doing it only in my mind however... I can believe only 2% can manage that.

I once wrote a lisp program to solve this...

Fritzvalt:
Not hard. The easiest way to go about solving that is to graph it out.

This.

Though admittedly, the wording tripped me up on one of the houses and I switched one for another ("Looking from infront, the green house is just to the left of the white house").
Otherwise, it is do-able. How long it takes will vary from person to person.