It’s important to exercise your brain, I do so by playing chess and occasionally going over a few brain teasers or logic puzzles. Staying sharp is important in any industry and I have found playing chess or going over logic puzzles has greatly improved my problem solving and creating thinking abilities.
Here are a few logic puzzles I have come across that I really like, let’s see if you can find the answers.
Bulbs
Imagine you are in a room with 3 switches. In an adjacent room there are 3 bulbs (let’s say in lamps which are on a regular table), each switch belongs to one bulb. All are off at the moment. It is impossible to see from one room to another. No help from anybody else is allowed.
How can you find out which switch belongs to which bulb, if you may enter the room with the bulbs only once?
The Man in the Elevator
A man lives on the tenth floor of a building. Every morning he takes the elevator down to the lobby and leaves the building. In the evening, he gets into the elevator, and, if there is someone else in the elevator – or if it was raining that day – he goes back to his floor directly. Otherwise, he goes to the seventh floor and walks up three flights of stairs to his apartment. How come?
Burning rope
There are two lengths of rope.
Each one can burn in exactly one hour.
They are not necessarily of the same length or width as each other.
They also are not of uniform width (may be wider in middle than on the end), thus burning half of the rope is not necessarily 1/2 hour.
By burning the ropes, how do you measure exactly 45 minutes worth of time?
Count the F’s (only once!)
FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE-
SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIF-
IC STUDY COMBINED WITH
THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.
The man with the hat
There are four man standing in front of a firing-squad. Two of them (nr.1 & 3) wear a black hat and two of them (nr.2 & 4) wear a white hat. They are all facing the same direction and between nr.3 and nr.4 stands a brick wall (see picture). So nr.1 can see nr.2 & 3, nr.2 sees nr.3, nr.3 sees only the wall and nr.4 doesn’t see a thing. The men know that there are two white and two black hats.
The commander of the firing-squad is willing to let the men go if one of them can say what color hat he is wearing. The men are not allowed to talk. The only thing they may say is “I’m wearing a white/black hat”. If one of the men knows which hat he is wearing he must tell it and all men will be free.
Which man knows 100% sure what color hat he’s wearing?
Lost
You are lost in a forest. The forest is between two villages. In village A live only liars, they always lie. In village B people always tell the truth. You want to go to village B. Then you see a man from village A or B. You can ask him only one question.
Which question will you ask him to know for sure where village B is ?
Were you able to solve any of them? What do you do to exercise your mind? Have any other logic puzzles you want to share?
Comments