There’s nothing like a good riddle to stimulate your mind and give you an excuse to channel your inner Sherlock Holmes. Sure, the thrill of solving puzzles may not give you the adrenaline rush of a skydive, but regularly doing logic and crossword puzzles can keep your brain young as you age. And they’re just a lot of fun
Now, you can take your problem-solving skills to the next level with a riddle that Albert Einstein invented himself. The story goes that Einstein wrote this complicated logic puzzle when he was a young man, and he estimated that only two percent of the people who tried to solve it would successfully do so.
While there isn’t any solid evidence to confirm that Einstein created it—and somehow prophesied the exact number of people to get it right—it’s still a mind-bending puzzle. Doing some of these weird brain puzzles can make you smarter, too.
Here’s the setup: There are five houses, each painted a different color. In each house lives a person with a different nationality. These five owners drink a certain type of beverage, smoke a certain brand of cigar, and keep a certain pet. No owners have the same pet, smoke the same cigar, or drink the same beverage.
The question is, who owns the fish?
Here are the clues:
The Brit lives in the red house
The Swede keeps dogs as pets
The Dane drinks tea
The green house is on the left of the white house
The green house’s owner drinks coffee
The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds
The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill
The man living in the center house drinks milk
The Norwegian lives in the first house
The man who smokes blends lives next to the one who keeps cats
The man who keeps horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill
The owner who smokes BlueMaster drinks beer
The German smokes Prince
The Norwegian lives next to the blue house
The man who smokes blend has a neighbor who drinks water
Take some time and think it over. Draw out each house. Make a chart for each category, if you want to get really detailed.