Puzzles That Fox You

A puzzle is anything that is difficult to understand or make sense of. It is a problem or question that you have to answer using your skill or knowledge. A puzzle is designed for testing ingenuity.

On the other hand a paradox is a statement that is seemingly contradictory or opposed to common sense yet is perhaps true. It therefore means an apparently self-contradictory statement, which can only be true if it is false, and vice versa.

Every paradox is also a puzzle but every puzzle is not a paradox .

The following are few well known puzzles.

1. Yadav is looking at Prema. Prema is looking at Sampath. Yadhav is married, Sampath is not and we don’t know if Prema is married. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person

Solution :Yes. If Prema is married, then she is married and looking at Sampath who is unmarried. If Prema is unmarried, then Yadav who is married, is looking at her. Either way, the statement is correct.

2.There are three bags, each containing two marbles. Bag A contains two white marbles, Bag B contains two black marbles, and Bag C contains one white marble and one black marble. You pick a random bag and take out one marble, which is white. What is the probability that the remaining marble from the same bag is also white?

Solution: 2 out of 3. You know you don’t have Bag B. But because Bag A has two white marbles, you could have picked either marble; if you think of it as four marbles in total from Bags A and C, three white and one black, you’ll have a greater chance of picking another white marble.

3.The following resolution was passed by the Board of Councilmen, in Canton, Mississippi.Resolved by this council that we build a new Jail

Resolved that the new Jail will be built out of the materials of old jail

Resolved that the old jail will be used until the new jail is finished.

4.A man has 53 socks in his drawer: 21 identical blue, 15 identical black and 17 identical red. The lights are out and he is completely in the dark. How many socks must he take out to make 100 percent certain he has at least one pair of black socks?

Solution: 40 socks. If he takes out 38 socks (adding the two biggest amounts, 21 and 17), although it is very unlikely, it is possible they could all be blue and red. To make 100 percent certain that he also has a pair of black socks he must take out a further two socks.

5.This famous river crossing problem is known as the “bridge and torch” puzzle. Four people are crossing a bridge at night, so they all need a torch—but they just have one that only lasts 15 minutes. Aruna can cross in one minute, Seenu in two minutes, sarala in five minutes and Ashok in eight minutes. No more than two people can cross at a time; and when two cross, they have to go at the slower person’s pace. How do they get across in 15 minutes

Solution : Aruna and seenu cross first in two minutes, and Aruna crosses back alone with the torch in one minute. Then , sarala and Ashok, cross in eight minutes. Seenu returns in two minutes, and Aruna and and seenu return in two minutes. They just made it in 15 minutes exactly.

6.The Lawyer Puzzle

How can a witness reply to a lawyer who says”Please answer yes or no to the following question” will the next word you speak be no?”

7.Card Puzzle

Front: The sentence on the other side of this card is True.

Back: The sentence on the other side of this card is False.

Trying to assign a truth value to either of them leads to a puzzle.

8.The Marlowe Puzzle

Imagine that a time traveler buys a copy of Doctor Faustus from a bookstore, travels back in time to Elizabethan London, and hands the book to Marlowe, who then copies it out and claims it as his own work. Over the centuries that follow, Doctor Faustus is reprinted and reproduced countless times until finally a copy of it ends up back in the same original bookstore, where the time traveler finds it, buys it, and takes it back to Marlowe . Who, then, wrote Doctor Faustus ?

9.The Postcard Puzzle

Imagine you’re holding a postcard in your hand, on one side of which is written, “The statement on the other side of this card is true.” We’ll call that Statement A. Turn the card over, and the opposite side reads, “The statement on the other side of this card is false” (Statement B). Trying to assign any truth to either Statement A or B, however, leads to a puzzle : If A is true then B must be as well, but for B to be true, A has to be false. Oppositely, if A is false then B must be false too, which must ultimately makes A true.

10..The Ship Puzzle

The ship puzzle was invented by the British logician Philip Jourdain in the early 1900s.Theseus was a mythical king and the hero of Athens. (He was the guy who slayed the Minotaur, amongst other feats.) Hel did a lot of sailing, and his famed ship was eventually kept in an Athenian harbour as a sort of memorial/museum piece. As time went on, the ship’s wood began to rot in various places. Those wooden pieces were replaced, one by one. Gradually more pieces needed replacing. The process of replacing rotten planks with new ones continued, at least in modern versions of the paradox, until the entire ship was made up of new pieces of wood. This thought experiment asks the question: Is this completely refurbished vessel still the ship of Theseus?

Let’s take it a step further: What if someone else took all of the discarded, original pieces of wood and reassembled them into a ship. Would this object be Theseus’s ship? And if so, what do we make of the restored ship sitting in the harbour? Which is they original ship?

This puzzle is all about the nature of identity over time, which asks whether an object remains the same after all the aggregate parts have been replaced.

11.The Liar puzzle

 The Liar Puzzle, has a very simple premise but a very mind-boggling result. Here it is:

This sentence is false.

Think about it for a moment.

If the statement is true, then that means that the sentence is in fact false, as it claims. But that would then mean that the sentence is false. And if the sentence “this sentence is false” is false, then that means it’s true. But, if it’s true that it’s false, then—you get the picture. It goes on and on, forever.

12.There is a book of one hundred pages, with just one sentence printed on each page. On page 1 we read ” the sentence printed on page 2 of this book is true” . On page 2 we read “the sentence printed on page 3 is true”. And so on up to page 99. However on page 100, the last page we read ” The sentence printed on the first page is false.

13.The fruits Puzzle: There are three crates, one with apples, one with oranges, and one with both apples and oranges mixed. Each crate is closed and labeled with one of three labels: Apples, Oranges, or Apples and Oranges. The label maker broke and labeled all of the crates incorrectly. How could you pick just one fruit from one crate to figure out what’s in each crate

Solution: Pick a fruit from the crate marked Apples and Oranges. If that fruit is an apple, you know that the crate should be labeled Apples because all of the labels are incorrect as they are. Therefore, you know the crate marked Apples must be Oranges (if it were labeled Apples and Oranges, the Oranges crate would be labeled correctly, and we know it isn’t), and the one marked Oranges is Apples and Oranges. Alternately, if you picked an orange from the crate marked Apples and Oranges, you know that crate should be marked Oranges, the one marked Oranges must be Apples, and the one marked Apples must be Apples and Oranges.

14.There is a book of one hundred pages, with just one sentence printed on each page. On page 1 we read ” the sentence printed on page 2 of this book is true” . On page 2 we read “the sentence printed on page 3 is true”. And so on up to page 99. However on page 100, the last page we read ” The sentence printed on page one is false.