Apolitical Intelligence Tests With Important Point to Follow

Ok...here's the reasoning, which I've state poorly before. With the room costing $25, each should only have paid 8.33, but they've paid 10, which means each overpaid by $1.66. They each got $1 back, missing 66 cents each which is equal to $2 if you multiply the 66 cents by 3.

Or....

Each paid 9 x 3 = 27. The owner have the 25, they men have 3, the bell boy have 2, total equal 30??

 

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1. I was responding to Pycchia, who used the word "malformed" in describing the old riddle.
2. Many things we say are "vague at best." That's life. That's not just the English language, but all languages. So what IS your point?
3. It's a poem! Hello. Why don't you display your poetic expertise and present something that survives for 150 years, is thoughtful and amusing and can ONLY
be interpreted in one pure way! Wouldn't that be special. Let's see you try. In California.

http://PeoplesRepublicOfCalifornia.wordpress.com

 

Bingo!. The two dollars the bell boy kept is part of the twenty-seven the men paid. By adding the two to the twenty-seven it is being accounted for twice and the three dollars returned is ignored.

 

Again with your stupid link. Why are you trying to derail your own thread with this stupid nonsense in a thread about intelligence.

I do not care that the riddle withstood 150 years. As it presented, it isn't clear one bit to make a determination. That you can't see such isn't much of a surprise now is it.

Since you are so fond on links, here's one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_I_was_going_to_St_Ives

All potential answers to this riddle are based on its ambiguity because the riddle only tells us the group has been "met" on the journey to St. Ives and gives no further information about its intentions, only those of the narrator. In modern usage, 'to meet someone on the road' may include the sense of 'passed' or 'overtook'

And from your answer, why did you felt the need to add "of THOSE" which WAS NOT part of the riddle!

Answer: Zero. "Kits, cats, sacks, wives, how many (of THOSE) were going to St. Ives?"

 

Correct.

 

Another way to explain this is to say the amount paid to the hotel was $25....so you take the $27 paid by the men and you subtract the $2 taken by the bellboy in order to arrive at the $25 total.

 

Good question. The link has numerous pictures and references to how unintelligent citizens and leaders of California are.

And you would be competent to "make a determination"? Based on what, pray tell?

You meant to say "so fond OF links" but intellectual powerhouse that you clearly are, typed "on" instead, and then you failed to catch that mistake as well as others.

Had that been the author's intention, he would have used "passed," one might reasonably conclude. But not you. You simply wish to argue, and fabricate points as you go, however ill-considered or worded.

Why did I "felt" the need? To make the antecedent perfectly clear. Nota bene: I did NOT "add 'of THOSE'" to the riddle. I put the clarification in parentheses.
You spin and argue for some reason. I don't know why and don't really care. My point was simply that the same information is very often interpreted in myriad ways. You prove it and miss that point.

ciao

 

"Important point to follow." The solution is trivial compared with the "important point to follow."
It is an amusing riddle, and I added my own interpretation of it, which I have confirmed with many well-educated friends.
That some here are so incensed with my particular solution is amusing and validates my Important Point emphatically.

Those "far more representative" mathematical and logic quizzes to which you refer could not possibly make the Important Point all here have demonstrated.

 

It have nothing to do with the topic at hand, unless you are attempting a childish insult (not a surprise coming from you).

I'm saying the word "met" is vague. It doesn't one way or the other saying the men and the wives are heading one way or the other.

Rich coming from a guy who have no understanding of the word "met." Your silly gotcha is another attempt to derail your own thread. How pathetic.

You have ZERO CLUE as to the author's intention, whatever that might be. What is evident is the way the riddle have been written, but you can argue and be stubborn about it if you want.

That isn't a "clarification", that is editorializing the riddle to rationalize and justify your answer. Adding your editorial changes the meaning of the riddle.

Spin? Argue? LOL...Isn't that what you are doing? The fact of the matter is you are perpetrating FAKE NEWS by editorializing the riddle to spin and rationalize your answer to convinced us that nobody else is correct but you. YOU missed the point of your own thread. Hilarious.

 

Logical fallacy.

By the way, had you read the link I've given you instead of resorting to fake news and childish insult, you would have found what the original solution from the author was:


"Why the deuce do you give yourselves so much vexation,
And puzzle your brains with a long calculation
Of the number of cats, with their kittens and sacks,
Which went to St Ives, on the old women's backs,
As you seem to suppose? — Don't you see that the cunning
Old Querist went only? — The rest were all coming.
But grant the wives went too, — as sure's they were married,
Eight only could go, — for the rest were all carried."

 

One I've always loved is the monty hall problem. It got me and a bunch of others on a philosophy forum going for at least a week.

The situation is that you're on a game show called Let's make a deal. Monty Hall is standing in front of 3 doors. Behind one of the doors is a car, and behind the other two doors are goats. You choose door number 1, and then Monty (who knows which door the car is behind) opens door number 2 revealing a goat. Monty gives you the chance to choose which door again.

Do you stay with door number 1 or change to door number 3?

 

I had forgotten all about this one. I think the original was a flower store with a corrupt employee. Three brothers are going to visit their mom who is in the hospital. A real classic!

But of course, the answer is that there is no "extra dollar". 25 in the till, 2 in the pocket, and 3 in the pockets of the men.

 

Here's another fun one, but probably too easy.

You see a bear in front of you. There are no bears behind you, to your left, or your right. The only direction you can run is south.

How is this possible?

 

The real riddle here is what you are hoping to accomplish in this thread.

It appears that you are working on the false premise of liberals having less intelligence. The first puzzle was little more than a trick on wordplay and the second easily solved with a truth table. Children can solve these problems.

As to your ideas as to contorted way of thinking and expressing oneself, it appears this thread finds you arguing with other conservatives as to the logic in the puzzles.

However, some of the posters are trying to read into, or expand the scope of the puzzle in ways that just aren't there. This is the way cons work. The con supplies just enough information and a certain segment of the population will read things into it and essentially con themselves.

There were studies done, back in the nineties, in response to scams like "recovered memories", that revealed an interesting fact about Americans, something PT Barnum knew quite well.

Turns out that a certain segment of the population, around a quarter of the population, can be convinced to believe just about anything. Another portion, 25% or so, are always thinking and very difficult to trick into believing things that aren't true. The rest, the 50% or so, in the middle, can sometimes be convinced to believe things that aren't true. Thus was bore out in the run up to Bush's war on Iraq when 2/3rds of the US population were led to believe that Iraqis were among the highjackers on September 11, when in fact none were. Some people still insist there were.

.

 

"of them" is a cheap tactic.

The only problem is that prisoner #1 could have seen 2 black hats. He still wouldn't know, so he would pass. He could have seen a red and a black hat, so again a pass.

 

But you are not responding to the riddle in the OP.

 

You've quoted me giving an answer to the riddle in the OP.

 

This took me a little while to conceptualize, but the OP is correct.

-The fact that P1 passed tells you only that he did not see 2 reds. This only leaves open the potential that he saw 2 blacks or 1 of each.

-When it comes to P2 passing, that means that he did not see 2 reds, AND it means that he also did not see a red hat on P3 (because if P3 had a red hat, that would mean that P2 has a black hat because otherwise P1 would have seen 2 reds and not passed)

-Since P1 and P2 passed, P3 knows that his hat is black, because If P3 had a red hat, P2 would have known that his own hat was black and would not have passed

 

RBR
first guy sees r and b, second guy sees two rs, so it's black.
BRR
first guy sees two reds. game over.
RRB
first sees r and b, second sees r and b, thirds sees r and r he wins.

here's the kicker...

BBB
first sees two blacks, second sees two blacks, third sees two blacks. However, because the other options all resulted in wins, then the only possibility is that the blind guy is also wearing black.

Man, that's a really good one.

 

The second, not the first. I don't know about the historical riddle it is derived from, but as written, it is of a typical type that throws in a lot of extra details that have no bearing on the puzzle at hand. Clearly the riddle only mentions "I" as going to St. Ives.

In any case, I am pretty sure that the purpose of this thread was to insult those on the left. I think it failed to reach it's objective.

 

I'm not going through the pointless exercise given the clear intention of the OP. He linked twice a link with intent to insult. That is his childish MO.

 

You are at the north pole.

 

For starters. You need to relax. This is a thread about brain teasers. Brain teasers are supposed to be difficult, or at minimum require one to think for a bit because they are designed to be tricky. While the OP did indeed throw in a dig at leftists, that dig is hardly the predicate of the thread and it seems that nobody has taken it as a partisan argument other than you. This has been a pleasant diversion from the typical at your throat political arguing, but you cant seem to help yourself.

On top of that, you have been condescending from the very beginning, acting as if you figured it out in seconds while reading the puzzle for the very first time ever. Since you were being so condescending, I asked you to explain how it detects 3 black hats to see if you knew what you were talking about. Your explanation was definitely INCORRECT. While condescendingly insisting that a child could figure this out, you yourself were wrong about the puzzle.

You specifically said ....

This answer is wrong. It does NOT require that the red hats are on the sighted prisoners. It works perfectly fine even if all 3 prisoners are wearing a black hat. Your condescension is obviously misplaced, because your analysis is demonstrably wrong/incomplete. It seems that your simple "truth table" is faulty. There is actually nothing to be ashamed of, because that is the intent of brain teasers, but you are trying to act as if you are so intelligent that brain teasers provide no challenge for you, which is obviously incorrect. Using your logic, it seems that you have difficulty solving a puzzle that even children are capable of solving. Also using your logic, I suppose this puts you in your stated "25% that can be convinced of just about anything" group.

I had no intention of pointing out that you were incorrect while being condescending, but your repeated and continued condescension left me without a choice.