Touted as one of the toughest riddles, Einstein's Riddle was written by Einstein when he was a young man. He had estimated that only 2 percent of the people who attempt it can solve it.
"Variations of this riddle appear on the net from time to time. It is sometimes attributed to Albert Einstein and it is claimed that 98% of the people are incapable of solving it. Some commentators suggest that Einstein created such puzzles not to test out intelligence but to get rid of all the students who wanted him as an advisor. It is not likely that there is any truth to these stories. Wherever this comes from, it is a nice riddle," a report available on Stanford University website says.
The riddle
Let us assume that there are five houses of different colors next to each other on the same road. In each house lives a man of a different nationality. Every man has his favorite drink, his favorite brand of cigarettes, and keeps pets of a particular kind.
The Englishman lives in the red house.
The Swede keeps dogs.
The Dane drinks tea.
The green house is just to the left of the white one.
The owner of the greenhouse drinks coffee.
The Pall Mall smoker keeps birds.
The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhills.
The man in the center house drinks milk.
The Norwegian lives in the first house.
The Blend smoker has a neighbor who keeps cats.
The man who smokes Blue Masters drinks bier.
The man who keeps horses lives next to the Dunhill smoker.
The German smokes Prince.
The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
The Blend smoker has a neighbor who drinks water.
The question to be answered is: Who keeps fish?
How to solve it?
Are you in the 2 percent who can solve this riddle? Let's find out
The easiest way to solve this riddle is to use grids where you need to define the rows and the columns as per the color of the house, nationality of the house owner, smoking and drinking habits, and the pets each house has.
You need to fill in the squares as per the information given in the question.
This will help you to find the answer to who owns the fish, which is the German in house number 4.
For reference:
This tweet has explained the riddle using flowcharts:
