I’m kinda into logic and puzzles. So I found this puzzle on the internet, and since it was harder to solve than what I first realized, I thought I’d run through the process I used to solve it. I believe the puzzle to be created by Jerome R. Breitenbach and can be found in it’s original state on this page.

To begin with, here’s the premise:

In a particular apartment complex, five different people–Arnie, Bernice, Chip, Daniel, and Elizabeth–live in five different apartments–A, B, C, D, and E–that are contiguous and ordered alphabetically. Each person owns a different pet–aardvark, badger, crocodile, dolphin, or egret. Each person prefers a different drink–ale, beer, coffee, dry martini, or espresso. And, each person participates in a different sport–arm wrestling, baseball, car racing, diving, or equestrian. Also:

• Each person lives next-door to a person having a gender that is different than their own.
• For each person, the first letter of their name, apartment, pet, drink, and sport are all different.
• For each person, the number of letters (spaces not included) in their name, apartment, pet, drink, and sport are all different.

Question: Who participates in the sport of equestrian, and what does the owner of the dolphin drink?

Give it a try yourself, and see if you come up with the same answer as me. When you’re ready, take a look at my solution.

Let’s begin walking through the solution…

1. The apartments are in sequential order A to E …

2. Each person lives next door to someone who has a different gener than their own. It’s not specified whether or not [i]both[/i] neighbors must have a gender other than their own, but let’s start off like this. I’m assuming that Elizabeth and Berenice are women and the other three are men. So let’s go man-woman-man-woman-man for the sake of simplicity.

3. Let’s move on to the pets.

So far, so good. The number of letters in each person’s name & pet are different and the first letter of each person’s name, apartment and pet are different.

4. Continuemos con their favorite drinks

For each person, the number of letters in each item is different, as is the beginning letter. Up to here we’re doing fine.

4. The last item is the person’s sport. Let’s take a look at them, along with the lengths of the words. Yikes! they won’t fit in with what we’ve got!

So, you could go ahead and try random rearrangements, but I’ll try something better. Want the answer? I’ll post it tomorrow (or when I figure it out:) )

27 September 2006 4:44 pm
Cats: Logic/Puzzles, Programming
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