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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQS);faqs.473



Need some work:

2.56.  She said "I love you," and died.  (EMS)

Q.  A woman gets up, drives to town, buys a gun, and shoots her husband.

>  >"He opens his mouth and she dies."  (Ivan A Derzhanski)

>  >"He comes home, undresses, turns the light off and goes to bed. After a few
>  >minutes he springs up and says, `There's a corpse under my bed!'"
(Ivan A Derzhanski)

2.34.  A man is holding a box.  Though he cannot see into it, he knows
what's inside.  (Eric Stephan original)

-----------------------------------------

Miscellaneous others:

2.24.  The telephone rang in the middle of the night and the woman woke
up.  When she answered it the caller hung up.  The caller felt better.
(Sasan Soltani)

2.27.  A man called to a waiter in a restaurant, "There's a fly in my
tea!"  "I will bring you a fresh cup of tea," said the waiter.  After a
few moments, the man called out, "This is the same cup of tea!"  How did
he know?  (PRO)

2.28.  A man drives over a broken glass bottle.  He travels the last 100
miles of the Sahara 5000 roadrace with a flat tire.  (EMS)

2.35.  A man was walking along some railroad tracks when he noticed that
a train was coming.  He ran toward the train before stepping aside. (RM)

2.41.  A man puts a quarter down, and leaves.  (PRO)

2.44.  A dish moves, a scientist makes a discovery.  (MN)

2.45.  An Arab sheikh tells his two sons that are to race their camels
to a distant city to see who will inherit his fortune.  The one whose
camel arrives last will win.  The brothers, after wandering aimlessly
for days, ask a wise man for advise.  After hearing the advice they jump
on the camels and race as fast as they can to their destination.  (PRO)

2.46.  Two children born in the same hospital, in the same hour, day,
and year, have the same mother and father, but are not twins.  (Sasan
Soltani)

2.47.  A couple will build a square house.  In each wall they'll have a
window, and each window will face north.  (Sasan Soltani)

The man who built it didn't use it, the man who used it didn't want it,
etc.

2.52.  A man pleads with his boss not to fly to Chicago.  The boss goes
anyway, and when he returns, he fires the man.  (EMS)

2.53.  On an archeological dig, the frozen remains of a man and woman
are found.  Immediately, the archeologists realize that the remains are
those of Adam and Eve.  (EMS)

2.54.  A man carrying an attache case full of $20 bills falls on the way
to the bank and is never seen again.  (PRO)

Q.  A man sees his wife, and later kills her

>From [e-mail] Mon Dec 17 22:04:57 1990
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 90 22:07:25 EST
(Karen Karp)
4)  A guy is trapped in a room with a bed, a calender, a saw and a
table.  There are no windows or doors (except a vent to breathe if you
get technical).  How does the guy live and finally escape??

from Joe Kincaid:
      6)  A man is found dead at his work table.  The investigating policeman
          looks the scene over and immediately declares it to be murder.

From: Ivan A Derzhanski <[e-mail]>
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 92 15:03:19 GMT
Historical note: The oldest "situation puzzle" (well, kind of) I know
of is described in the Maqamat of Al-Hariri.  It is actually a puzzle
for lawyers, and it goes like this: "A man (X) had a brother (B), and
his wife had a brother (WB) too.  All of them were free Muslims by
birth.  When X died, all he left went to WB; B got nothing.  How can
thbis be lawful?"

Date:     Sat, 17 Nov 1990 03:14:00 -0500
From: [e-mail] (Mark Brader)
By the way, this one reminds me of the Isaac Asimov story where an agent
is shot and gives the dying clue "the blind man".  I think that might have
been the title, too, I don't remember.

1.35.  A policeman follows a burglar into a bar.  When he enters the bar
he finds two similar-looking men, dressed alike, with the loot between
them.  After several minutes he arrests one of the men.  (PRO, from
"Which is Which?" by Isaac Asimov; partial JM wording)

==> logic/situation.puzzles.outtakes.s <==

-----------------------------------------

Contra-reality puzzles, or, "That's not the way it works!"

2.10.  A man is sitting in a train compartment.  He sees a three-
fingered hand through the compartment window, in the hallway of the
train.  He opens the compartment door and shoots the person with the
three-fingered hand, but he goes free.  (Michael Bernstein)
2.10.  He's with a policeman, who's taking him to jail, and he uses the
policeman's gun.  He was convicted of his wife's murder; she had framed
him for it somehow, involving cutting off two of her own fingers and
mailing them to the police.  Since he had already been convicted of her
murder, he couldn't be tried twice for the same crime, and since he
obviously hadn't actually been guilty before, he's set free.  The main
problem with this question is that as far as I know, that's NOT how the
"double jeopardy" law works, and so it couldn't happen in real life.
Nonetheless, it's a neat setup.
[Further info:
>From [e-mail] Wed Feb 26 12:06:34 1992
By Cheryl Balbes:
Situation:
A woman sees a man on a train eating an orange. She shoots and kills him. She
is arrested and known to be sane and guilty but does not go to jail.
Solution:
The man and the woman were married. It was a terrible marriage - so terrible
that he wanted revenge for it. So he cut off three of his fingers and burned
down the house. The police arrived and arrested the woman for murder of her
husband, citing the fingers as evidence of his death. She was tried and
convicted and went to jail for most of her life. When she finally got out, she
took a train ride and saw a man eating an orange. When he used the orange
peeler, she could see that he was missing three fingers so she knew he was her
husband. For ruining her life, she took out a gun and shot him dead. She was
arrested and known to be guilty, but could not go to jail again for the same
crime.
Dan Cory]
[Ian Collier has a slightly variant answer:
30 years ago, the man and the woman (his wife) attempted to
defraud the insurance company by faking her death. However he was found
guilty of murdering his wife and given a long prison sentence (his wife
remained hidden and made no attempt to prevent the conviction). The man,
having just been freed from prison, summons his wife from a far city
and shoots her. He is not punished, because he has already served the
sentence.]

2.61.  A man ran into a fire, and lived.  A man stayed where there was
no fire, and died.  (Eric Wang original)
2.61.  The two men were computer programmers working in a small room
protected by a halon gas fire extinguisher system, when a fire broke out
in an adjoining room.  One of the programmers ran through the fire and
escaped with only minor burns.  The other one stayed in the room until
the building's fire extinguishers kicked in, and died of oxygen
starvation when the halon gas combined with all of the oxygen in the
room.  I'm told by Rolf Wilson that this really isn't how halon gas
extinguishers work, so this puzzle should unfortunately be removed from
the list.

2.50.  The pope is giving a speech.  A man in the audience shoots the
mayor who is behind the pope.  (PRO)
2.50.  The pope has returned to the village where he began his
priesthood fifty years earlier.  He was late for the ceremony, so the
mayor spoke first; he claimed to be the first person to give confession
to the pope, fifty years earlier.  When the pope arrived, he related
that the first confession he had heard was that of the murder of a young
woman.  The man in the audience had a sister who was murdered at that
time.  The sanctity of the confessional is conveniently ignored.

Date: 2 Feb 92 23:05:11 GMT
In article <[e-mail]>, weemba@libra (Matthew P Wiener) writes:
>Here's [one] I made up years ago: "She stopped having sex. She died."
A woman was a hemophiliac.  She stayed pregnant whenever possible.  When
she stopped having sex, she had her first period, and bled to death.
[jeh comments: there was a lot of debate on the Net about this, most of
which tended to conclude that (a) menstrual fluid isn't blood; (b) most
of the few female hemophiliacs die at birth; and (c) terminating a
pregnancy in any conceivable (heh) way is likely to result in too much
blood loss.]

1.37.  A holy man is dead in a room.  (Perry Deess original)
1.37.  The man is a Moslem.  He was caught stealing, and so his right
hand was cut off.  However, he's very devout, and thus isn't allowed
to eat using his left hand; so he starved to death.  It could be
argued that this isn't very realistic; he could've gotten someone to
feed him, or somehow eaten without using his hands at all.  And I
don't know if those rules of Islam really interact that way.  Any real
info would be appreciated.
[Ivan A Derzhanski writes:
They are supposed to use their left hand.  There is more than one tale
in the _Arabian Nights_ about someone who has lost his right hand,
typically as a punishment for theft (and typically unjustly).  He
conceals this fact (long sleeves and all that), until he is served a
meal and the storyteller sees him eating with his left hand, something
which is not exactly taboo, but is not the done thing either.
Note that the punishment for theft is known to be loss of the right
hand, not death by starvation.
I would be more interested to know what a Hindu would do.  Those
people are much more careful about what is to be done with which hand.
And, of course, there are many ways to lose a hand.]

-----------------------------------------

Clocks, calendars, money, and other numerical trivia:

2.15.  Two people are talking long distance on the phone; one is in an
East-Coast state, the other is in a West-Coast state.  The first asks
the other "What time is it?", hears the answer, and says, "That's funny.
It's the same time here!"  (EMS)
2.15.  One is in Eastern Oregon (in Mountain time), the other in
Western Florida (in Central time), and it's daylight-savings changeover
day at 1:30 AM.
2.15a.  Variant answer: The east-coast state is in the USA, on Eastern
Daylight time.  The west-coast state is Western Australia.  There's a
twelve-hour time difference, so it's 8 o'clock in both places.  (from
Tim Lambert.)

2.19.  A woman goes into a convenience store to buy a can of Coke.  She
pays for it with a $20 bill and receives $22 in change.  (MI; partial MB
wording)
2.19.  It's in Canada; she pays in American money and receives change in
Canadian money.  Mark Brader points out that the amount of change can
vary wildly depending on the price of the drink as well as both the
official exchange rate and the actual exchange rate given.

2.20.  A newspaper reported that Jacques Dubois finished first in the
walking race held in Paris.  The number of miles he walked was given
as 62,137.  The article was not in error.  (AR, quoting Richard Fowell;
MB wording)
2.20.  The comma, in European numbers, is used the same way Americans
use a decimal point.  The man thus (Americans would say) walked 62.137
miles, or 100 km.  Mark Brader points out that no newspaper in a country
which uses the decimal comma would report the distance in miles; if
anyone can think of a way around this problem, let me know.  One
possibility is to say that he walked 42,551 km (or whatever the actual
length of a marathon is); but I don't know whether there are such things
as walking marathons, or whether they'd be the same length in Europe as
in America.

Organization: Penn State University
Date: Tuesday, 4 Dec 1990 20:08:00 EST
From: SCOTT MATTHEWS <[e-mail]>
   A man goes to a hardware store to buy a certain item.  He asks the salesman
how much this item costs to which he answers, "They are 3 for $1.00."  The man
say, "Okay I'll take 100," to which the salesman correctly replies, "That will
be $1.00."  The man pays $1.00 and leaves satisfied.  What is the item.
[A: house numbers.]

>"A man, his son, and his grandson had their first birthday together."
(Matthew P Wiener original)
David Grabiner's answer:
Sweden had no leap-year days from 1748 to 1788 in order to catch up with
the Gregorian calendar without creating excessive trouble.  (In many
other countries, people found that their loans suddenly became due
eleven days earlier.)
Thus, the grandfather was born in Sweden on February 29, 1744; the
other two were born outside Sweden on February 29, 1768 and 1788,
and returned to Sweden before their fourth birthdays.
[jeh comments: this is, as Matt said in his original posting, an
obscure-calendar puzzle; and the net indicated that the calendar
story may not be true anyway.]

-----------------------------------------

Just too weird and/or random and/or silly for me:

2.17.  A woman walks up to a door and knocks.  Another woman answers the
door.  The woman outside kills the woman inside.  (GH)
2.17.  The woman outside is a psychotic librarian.  The woman inside has
an extremely overdue book.
2.17a.  Variant answer: The woman outside is married and lived at the
home in question.  She misplaced her key, and the door was answered by
her husband's lover.  Though this answer would allow the question to be
in section 1, it's really a much-less-interesting version of #1.15, and
it seems to me that it would be a fairly obvious answer.

2.59.  A man is lying dead in a pool of blood and glass.  (PRO)
2.59.  The man caught a large fish and was so excited he went to a phone
booth to call his wife.  In trying to describe the size of the fish, he
said, "It was THIS big!" and stretched his arms wide to indicate its
length.  His arms went through the sides of the phone booth, his wrists
were sliced by broken glass, and he bled to death.
[Variant from Bernd Wechner:
A man makes a telephone call and dies.
Answer: The man was ringing his wife, and learned from her that he had
won the lottery.  In jumping for joy he broke through the glass wall
of the telephone booth and cut his wrists whereupon he bled to death.]

2.60.  The seals came up to do their show but immediately dove back into
the water.  (PRO)
2.60.  The seals were frightened by an audience of nuns, who, to the
seals, looked like a herd of killer whales.

2.58.  A raft carrying passengers took a trip down a river.  None of the
passengers made it home alive.  (CR; partial JM wording)
2.58.  The raft was floating down the Amazon river when it floated under
a big tree.  A snake was hanging down out of the tree, so the people
pushed the entire raft away from the tree, where it capsized.  The
passengers were then eaten by piranha.

-----------------------------------------

Confusing the map with the territory, or, call by reference:

2.22.  In his own home a man watches as a woman dies, yet does nothing
to save her.  (MN)
2.22.  He saw it happening on TV.

2.39.  King Henry VIII is lying at the bottom of the stairs with a gash
across his face.  (PRO)
2.39.  It is a painting of Henry VIII.

2.40.  A man travels to twenty countries and stays in each country for a
month.  During this time he never sees the light of day.  (PRO)
2.40.  The man is a mummy, on tour to different museums throughout the
world.

[note similarity of type to "ship at bottom of sea" and "husband who'd
blown his brains out."]

-----------------------------------------

How to prove your audience are sexists:

2.48.  A boy and his father are injured in a car accident.  Both are
taken to a hospital.  The father dies at arrival, but the boy lives
and is taken to surgery.  A grey-haired, bespectacled surgeon looks at
the boy and says, "I cannot operate on this boy -- he's my son."  (JV)
2.48.  The surgeon is the boy's mother.  As with #2.45, #2.46, and
#2.47, I've frequently heard this as presented as a riddle; the
attributions for these indicate the first person to tell them to me as
mystery questions.

2.49.  A husband coming home hears his wife call "Bill, don't kill me!".
He walks in and finds his wife dead.  Inside are a postman, a doctor,
and a lawyer, none of whom the husband knows.  The husband immediately
realizes the postman killed his wife.  (EMS; partial JM wording)
2.49.  The postman is a man.  The doctor and lawyer are women.

-----------------------------------------

Need some work:

2.56.  She said "I love you," and died.  (EMS)
2.56.  She was a circus performer who performed rope tricks.  During one
of them, she hung from the ceiling holding only a rope in her mouth.
The other end of the rope was held by her husband.  There's no
motivation given for her choosing to do something so stupid; if anyone
wants to twiddle this into a more reasonable question, please do.

Q.  A woman gets up, drives to town, buys a gun, and shoots her husband.
A.  The woman suspects her husband of cheating on her.  She notes the mileage
    on the car each day.  The previous night, hubby worked late at the
    office, but the mileage on the car is far greater than can be
    accounted for.  (from Simon Travaglia)
[jeh comments: This last could make a really nice puzzle, but has too many
plotholes as it stands.  Rework it sometime.]

>  >"He opens his mouth and she dies."  (Ivan A Derzhanski)
The male acrobat
hangs from the ceiling and holds the female acrobat by his teeth.  He
drops her, and she breaks her spine.
[jeh comments: again, this needs more of a real story for me to accept
it.]

>  >"He comes home, undresses, turns the light off and goes to bed. After a few
>  >minutes he springs up and says, `There's a corpse under my bed!'"
(Ivan A Derzhanski)
He hears a watch
tick under the bed.  Why the watch has to be on the hand of someone
(and if it is, he is obviously dead, because his breath is not heard)
is left to the guessers' discretion.
[jeh comments: see previous comment.]

2.34.  A man is holding a box.  Though he cannot see into it, he knows
what's inside.  (Eric Stephan original)
2.34.  He's allergic to whatever's inside the box.
[jeh comments: how is this different from just being able to smell it?]

-----------------------------------------

Miscellaneous others:

2.24.  The telephone rang in the middle of the night and the woman woke
up.  When she answered it the caller hung up.  The caller felt better.
(Sasan Soltani)
2.24.  It was a husband calling from overseas to see that his wife
arrived home all right.  Hanging up before three seconds elapse results
in no charge to the calling party.  He could not call person-to-person
because the local operators did not speak English.

2.27.  A man called to a waiter in a restaurant, "There's a fly in my
tea!"  "I will bring you a fresh cup of tea," said the waiter.  After a
few moments, the man called out, "This is the same cup of tea!"  How did
he know?  (PRO)
2.27.  The man had already sugared his tea before sending it back.

2.28.  A man drives over a broken glass bottle.  He travels the last 100
miles of the Sahara 5000 roadrace with a flat tire.  (EMS)
2.28.  The flat tire is his spare.

2.35.  A man was walking along some railroad tracks when he noticed that
a train was coming.  He ran toward the train before stepping aside. (RM)
2.35.  The man was on a bridge, closer to the end the train was
approaching from.

2.41.  A man puts a quarter down, and leaves.  (PRO)
2.41.  The man has put a quarter of the cost of a new car into a down
payment; he then drives away in the car.

2.44.  A dish moves, a scientist makes a discovery.  (MN)
2.44.  The dish is a satellite dish.

2.45.  An Arab sheikh tells his two sons that are to race their camels
to a distant city to see who will inherit his fortune.  The one whose
camel arrives last will win.  The brothers, after wandering aimlessly
for days, ask a wise man for advise.  After hearing the advice they jump
on the camels and race as fast as they can to their destination.  (PRO)
2.45.  The wise man tells them to switch camels.

2.46.  Two children born in the same hospital, in the same hour, day,
and year, have the same mother and father, but are not twins.  (Sasan
Soltani)
2.46.  The children are two of a set of triplets.
[jeh wonders: is this fundamentally different from the people
crowding under an umbrella or the black-painted town?  Should all
three be together on one list or the other?]

2.47.  A couple will build a square house.  In each wall they'll have a
window, and each window will face north.  (Sasan Soltani)
2.47.  The house is at the south pole.  This is much the same question
as the age-old riddle asking what color a certain dead bear is.

The man who built it didn't use it, the man who used it didn't want it,
etc.  (A: coffin.)  Suggested as a story riddle by Ed Wagner.
[jeh sez: If I included this, I'd feel obliged to include every riddle I've
ever heard.]

2.52.  A man pleads with his boss not to fly to Chicago.  The boss goes
anyway, and when he returns, he fires the man.  (EMS)
2.52.  The man was a night watchman who told his boss that last night he
had a dream that the boss would die in a plane crash.  The boss fired
him for sleeping on the job.

2.53.  On an archeological dig, the frozen remains of a man and woman
are found.  Immediately, the archeologists realize that the remains are
those of Adam and Eve.  (EMS)
2.53.  The two bodies lacked what only Adam and Eve would lack --
bellybuttons.

2.54.  A man carrying an attache case full of $20 bills falls on the way
to the bank and is never seen again.  (PRO)
2.54.  The man falls off the river bank and drowns.

Q.  A man sees his wife, and later kills her
A.  The man sees his wife "performing" at a peep show.  (from Simon
Travaglia)

>From [e-mail] Mon Dec 17 22:04:57 1990
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 90 22:07:25 EST
(Karen Karp)
4)  A guy is trapped in a room with a bed, a calender, a saw and a
table.  There are no windows or doors (except a vent to breathe if you
get technical).  How does the guy live and finally escape??
4) He eats dates from the calender, drinks water from the springs in
the bed and saws the table in half, 2 halves make a whole and he
escapes out the hole.

from Joe Kincaid:
      6)  A man is found dead at his work table.  The investigating policeman
          looks the scene over and immediately declares it to be murder.
              The man is a blind hemophiliac who *always* keeps his work
          table in precise order because of his condition(s).  When he
          reached for his awl, it was turned upside-down and he impaled his
          hand on it.  Being a hemophiliac, he bled to death.  This couldn't
          happen by accident.
[jeh comments: I suppose this *could* happen in real life; but it seems to
me that it *could* happen by accident.  Perhaps this is no less plausible
than the "blind midget"-type puzzles; I'm ambivalent about it.  But I'm
leaving it out for now.]

From: Ivan A Derzhanski <[e-mail]>
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 92 15:03:19 GMT
Historical note: The oldest "situation puzzle" (well, kind of) I know
of is described in the Maqamat of Al-Hariri.  It is actually a puzzle
for lawyers, and it goes like this: "A man (X) had a brother (B), and
his wife had a brother (WB) too.  All of them were free Muslims by
birth.  When X died, all he left went to WB; B got nothing.  How can
thbis be lawful?"  Solution: "X had married his son (S) to his
mother-in-law (WM).  S died, but left a son, who turned out to be a
brother of X's wife (being a son of her mother, WM), but at the same
time he is a grandson of X, and the grandson, as a direct
descendant, has more rights to the heritage than the brother."

Date:     Sat, 17 Nov 1990 03:14:00 -0500
From: [e-mail] (Mark Brader)
By the way, this one reminds me of the Isaac Asimov story where an agent
is shot and gives the dying clue "the blind man".  I think that might have
been the title, too, I don't remember.  The solution:  the cover role of
the enemy agent who shot him was a repairman, and he got admission to
the premises to fix a broken window blind.
[jeh comments: reminds me of "The [Case of the?] Three Blind Mice,"
in which a dying man gasps that the one who killed him was "Mice..."
Turns out not to be "my s...ister" or "my s...on" or the character
named "Muyskins," but "my s...olicitor"; the guy is British.]

1.35.  A policeman follows a burglar into a bar.  When he enters the bar
he finds two similar-looking men, dressed alike, with the loot between
them.  After several minutes he arrests one of the men.  (PRO, from
"Which is Which?" by Isaac Asimov; partial JM wording)
1.35.  Both men were wearing glasses.  The burglar, however, was wearing
photosensitive sunglasses; the policeman noticed them changing shade and
realized the man must have just entered.




==> logic/situation.puzzles.p <==
                        Jed's List of Situation Puzzles

History:
   original compilation            11/28/87
   major revision                  08/09/89
   further additions               08/23/89 - 10/21/90
   variants added to answer list   07/04/90
   editing and renumbering         07/25/90 - 11/11/90
   items removed; title changed    09/20/90 - 11/11/90
   editing and additions           02/26/92 - 09/17/92


   "A man lies dead in a room with fifty-three bicycles in front of him.
What happened?"

   This is a list of what I refer to (for lack of a better name) as
situation puzzles.  In the game of situation puzzles, a situation like the
one above is presented to a group of players, who must then try to find
out more about the situation by asking further questions.  The person who
initially presented the situation can only answer "yes" or "no" to
questions (or occasionally "irrelevant" or "doesn't matter").

   My list has been divided into two sections.  Section 1 consists of
situation puzzles which are set in a realistic world; the situations could
all actually occur.  Section 2 consists of puzzles which involve double
meanings for one or more words and those which could not possibly take
place in reality as we know it, plus a few miscellaneous others.

   See the end of the list for more notes and comments.