Einstein's Riddle

[C1ay]

A traveller comes to a fork in the road and does not know how to get to his destination. 2 men are at the fork in the road. 1 of them always tells the truth, and the other one always lies. He may ask one of the men one question to find his way.

 

What question does he ask these men?

[rockytriton]

I enjoy many types of idle distractions, such as reading fiction.

[Jay-qu]

I have a few more of Einsteins riddles like those ones before, if anyone wants them :hyper: just ask

[Turtle]

___I don't mean to spoil any puzzle fun, but rather I want to understand why it is fun. Clearly you all enjoy it & I know a guy who buys books full of them, but when I come over to see what is the fun I just don't see it.

___I now figure either it's just something I'll never get :hyper: or something I still need to learn. :hihi:

[Jay-qu]

good question :hyper: I dont know, just the thrill of figuring out something you dont know with naught but your mind, I like it :hihi:

[C1ay]

I want to understand why it is fun.

The challenge and exercise for the mind.

[goku]

i tried it but got flustered and quit

[C1ay]

i tried it but got flustered and quit

See if this diagram will help. X out the things you know don't go together and use a dot or a circle or something to mark the things you know that do go together. You should be able to use a process of elimination to get it.

[Nevermind]

___I don't mean to spoil any puzzle fun, but rather I want to understand why it is fun. Clearly you all enjoy it & I know a guy who buys books full of them, but when I come over to see what is the fun I just don't see it.

___I now figure either it's just something I'll never get :surprise: or something I still need to learn. :confused:

 

There's no real answer to "why it is fun". I mean some people collect stamps and others bungee jump all in the name of fun! Different strokes for different folks I guess! Personally, I love riddles (so keep it coming!), puzzles, anything like that - but I also try never to look at any of that when I have lots of work to do - cos I know get a bit obsessed :surprise: and can't stop until I've solved it (I've even stayed home from work for a day cos I started a jigsaw puzzle (go figure!) in the morning while waiting for my lift, then I had to finish it!!!).

[CraigD]

___I don't mean to spoil any puzzle fun, but rather I want to understand why it is fun. Clearly you all enjoy it & I know a guy who buys books full of them, but when I come over to see what is the fun I just don't see it.

___I now figure either it's just something I'll never get :surprise: or something I still need to learn. :surprise:

Fun is very subjective, so I’ll just say why I like this sort of problem (which seems to belong to a type widely termed “logic puzzles”), by way of a personal history:

 

I’ve a vague recollection of something like this from school (grades 7-9, late 1970s, I think). They didn’t make much of an impression on me then. I encountered them again during my brief professorial career (1983-1984), teaching them in an intro/remedial undergrad Math class. Again, no big interest developed.

 

One vacation (mid-late 1990s), shopping for casual reading material, I encountered and, on a whim, purchased a magazine-format book of nothing but Logic Puzzles, published by PennyPress. I was immediately hooked. What did it was having so many together, in a consistent format (PennyPress supplies the “grid”, leaving just the essential filling out of it to you). Being pretty puffed-up still in those days with my bachelor-of-Math/highly-paid-computer-professional-hood, I was duly humbled by the several puzzles in the book that stumped me.

 

Of course, I promptly wrote a simple computer program to solve them, and was intrigued by the different and increasingly complicated logics the puzzles implied. Working to give my program the capability of solving every puzzle in that one book, I found that every few puzzles required additional kinds of logic and symbols. I never found a general algorithm – each new puzzle can introduce a new set of “is next to/across from”-type rules that can be very complicated to code.

 

I also realized that the step of translating from the book’s natural language to the formal one my program was complicated, and drew on a startling large “library” of ordinary knowledge, reminding me of Doug Lenat’s Cyc AI project.

 

In short, while not all that interested in solving the puzzles themselves, I was and continue to be fascinated by solving the “meta-puzzle” of how these problems are solved. For example, for the puzzle in this thread, I just perused it, decided that it didn’t have any statements I’d not seen in the PennyPress book, and didn’t bother to solve it. If I had, it would have: 1) taken me hours to remember how to solve this kind of problem; or 2) taken me hours to find and remember how to enter statements into my program for solving them. For me, labor remembered is sweeter than labor repeated. :confused:

[rockytriton]

___I don't mean to spoil any puzzle fun, but rather I want to understand why it is fun. Clearly you all enjoy it & I know a guy who buys books full of them, but when I come over to see what is the fun I just don't see it.

___I now figure either it's just something I'll never get :confused: or something I still need to learn. :surprise:

 

I find them fun for the same reason that I find playing guitar, piano and drums fun. It's a feeling of accomplishment I guess.

[WildRose1010]

I find these fun because it stretches how far your mind can go to think logically. You have all the information presented to you and all you need is to organize it to understand it. It was like the "fatal riddles" to the knights in the Dark Ages. It is also a great way to waste time when your professor drones on about the same subject for hours at a time! :)

[Turtle]

There's no real answer to "why it is fun". I mean some people collect stamps and others bungee jump all in the name of fun! Different strokes for different folks I guess!

 

___That is well said & sadly I overlooked that obvious point. Craig points out:

For example, for the puzzle in this thread, I just perused it, decided that it didn’t have any statements I’d not seen in the PennyPress book, and didn’t bother to solve it

This goes to my point of why I don't seem to find fun in these types of puzzles, i.e. the answers already exist. If a puzzle is a mystery for solving, why not find more fun in solving un-solved puzzles? Just for fun, maybe construct a puzzle.

___Maybe there is a truth table solution to this puzzle: All perfect numbers divide evenly by 2? :)