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The Zebra Puzzle is a famous logic puzzle. Its authorship is frequently attributed to a young Albert Einstein, and sometimes instead to Lewis Carroll, but there is little evidence to support either as the author. Furthermore, some of the brands of cigarette in the puzzle didn't exist in Carroll's lifetime, nor in Einstein's youth.

The precise details of the puzzle (such as the brand names) vary. The clues below are taken from the first known publication.

 1. There are five houses.
 2. The Englishman lives in the red house.
 3. The Spaniard owns the dog.
 4. Coffee is drunk in the green house.
 5. The Ukrainian drinks tea.
 6. The green house is immediately to the right of the ivory house.
 7. The Old Gold smoker owns snails.
 8. Kools are smoked in the yellow house.
 9. Milk is drunk in the middle house.
10. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
11. The man who smokes Chesterfields lives in the house next to the man with the fox.
12. Kools are smoked in the house next to the house where the horse is kept.
13. The Lucky Strike smoker drinks orange juice.
14. The Japanese smokes Parliaments.
15. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.

The question that the puzzle poses is: Who drinks water, and who owns the zebra?

In the interest of clarity, it must be added that each of the five houses is painted a different colour, and their inhabitants are of different nationalities, own different pets, drink different beverages and smoke different brands of cigarettes. The direction of left and right is based on the reader's viewpoint, looking at the houses in a row from the front.

Similar kind of Puzzles can be found everywhere, here few one of them :

Who Owns the Fish ?

Einstein's Riddle

Zebra Puzzles at Brainzilla.com

Solution[]

The puzzle is solved by deduction. The reader must take the given information and see what details are then forced. The next step is then to try assumptions out, and see whether they lead to contradictions which rule out possibilities. The techniques page contains a step-by-step solution, but you can see the answer by highlighting the text in the box below.

Solution: The Norwegian drinks water and the Japanese owns the zebra


Go to the techniques page →


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