The following puzzle is attributed to Albert Einstein or Lewis Carroll. It is sometimes called the Zebra Puzzle.
The situation
- There are five houses in five different colors.
- 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 brand of cigar, or drink the same beverage.
The question is: Who owns the fish?
Hints
- The Brit lives in the red house.
- The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
- The Dane drinks tea.
- The green house is immediately to the left of the white house.
- The owner of the green house drinks coffee.
- The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds.
- The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
- The person living in the center house drinks milk.
- The Norwegian lives in the first house.
- The person who smokes blends lives next to the person who keeps cats.
- The person who keeps horses lives next to the person who smokes Dunhill.
- The owner who smokes BlueMaster drinks beer.
- The German smokes Prince.
- The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
- The person who smokes blends has a neighbor who drinks water.
The original article attributed the riddle to Einstein and repeated the claim that 98% of people could not solve it. That attribution and statistic are widely circulated, but should be treated as part of the puzzle's folklore rather than established fact.
The following class diagram abstracts the information in the puzzle.
