2010- 2009
- 2008
- 2007
- 2006
2005
Shell Acoustics- Context Menus
- Security Lecture
- Unfortunate Typo
- Logging Out
- Switch
- Through the Looking Glass
- Scotland Video
- Comma Separated Values
- OU-M880 (Soft Eng)
- Cycling Britain
- Hidden Costs
- Hiring
- Golden
- Style vs Substance
- Bess
- Ajax Content
- DHTML Client
- Over There
- Content Hijacking
- Raw Statistics
- Trying to Fail
- SETI@home 2500
- Security Separation
- Gamma Ray Bursts
- Fishy Behaviour
- Moo Browser
- Caption this Photo
- All Good Things
- Dalek
- Moo Direction
- Open University
- OU-M865 (Projects)
- OU-M876 (Data)
- OU-M886 (Security)
- OU-M878 (Objects)
- OU-M874 (Java)
- OU-M873 (UI)
- Einstein's Riddle
- Glowing Books
- Hogmanay
- 2004
- 2003
- 2002
Einstein's Riddle
15 January 2005
While looking for pictures of exploding pigeons, I stumbled across Einstein's Riddle. After a few minutes of work (most of which was spent flailing around in Python's terrible documentation), a program emerged which spat out one answer. I'd intended to optimise it, but since it only takes half a second to run, there didn't seem much point. Fun little problem.
Google shows that there are quite a few people who have solved this problem using one language or another. My favourite has to be FormulaOne. How one writes the FormulaOne compiler, I've no idea, but that's a pretty powerful language -- at least for this type of problem. I'm unconvinced that one could use it to write blogging software of equal elegance.
One odd thing that nobody else seems to have spotted is that the 15th rule is not required (The man who smokes Blends has a neighbour who drinks water). The inclusion of a redundant rule makes me suspect that this riddle did not in fact come from Einstein. It would be interesting to generalise the solving program and then write a program to generate riddles of this type, seeking the most elegantly simple one.
Update: No! For the upteenth time, I am NOT this man. Geeze, it's like people think there's only one person in this town who knows what an IP address is. Well I guess now that's true.
