A PERSONAL JOURNAL, KEPT LARGELY TO RECORD REFERENCES TO WRITINGS, MUSIC, POLITICS, ECONOMICS, WORLD HAPPENINGS, PLAYS, FILMS, PAINTINGS, OBJECTS, BUILDINGS, SPORTING EVENTS, FOODS, WINES, PLACES AND/OR PEOPLE.
Are you a problem solver? Have you got the brainpower to solve these fiendishly difficult puzzles? Scroll down to find out.
On National Puzzle Day, we’ve collated some of the trickiest brainteasers for you to solve.
10. Sudoku
The Everest of numerical games, dubbed the world’s hardest Sudoku puzzle, was published by Arto Inkala, a Finnish mathematician.
Can you solve it? Click to flip and reveal the answer ...
9. The 'world's hardest logic puzzle
There's no escape from this green-eyed logic puzzle....
Did you give up? Here's the answer ...
8. Einstein’s riddle
Albert Photo: REX
When Einstein wrote this riddle he apparently said that 98% of the world would not be able to solve it:
There are 5 houses in five different colours.
In each house lives a person with a different nationality.
These five owners drink a certain type of beverage, smoke a certain brand of cigar and keep a certain pet.
No owners have the same pet, smoke the same brand of cigar or drink the same beverage.
The question is: Who owns the fish?
Hints
The Brit lives in the red house
The Swede keeps dogs as pets
The Dane drinks tea
The green house is on the left of the white house
The green house's owner drinks coffee
The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds
The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill
The man living in the centre house drinks milk
The Norwegian lives in the first house
The man who smokes blends lives next to the one who keeps cats
The man who keeps horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill
The owner who smokes BlueMaster drinks beer
The German smokes Prince
The Norwegian lives next to the blue house
The man who smokes blend has a neighbour who drinks water
Here's the answer:
7. The George Boolos puzzle
Can you solve this riddle? It was created by US logician George Boolos shortly before his death in 1996.
“Three gods A, B, and C are called, in no particular order, True, False, and Random. True always speaks truly, False always speaks falsely, but whether Random speaks truly or falsely is a completely random matter. Your task is to determine the identities of A, B, and C by asking three yes-no questions; each question must be put to exactly one god. The gods understand English, but will answer all questions in their own language, in which the words for yes and no are da and ja, in some order. You do not know which word means which.”
6. Can you work out what spot this car is parked in?
Here's the answer...
5. When is Cheryl's birthday?
Cheryl gives her new friends Albert and Bernard 10 possible dates when they enquired about her birthday Photo: Kenneth Kong/Facebook
Cheryl and her birthday caused a furore after a confusing question involving two characters named Bernard and Albert went viral.
Cheryl gives her new friends, Albert and Bernard, ten possible dates to choose from when they enquire about her date of birth. She then tells Albert the month and Bernard the day of her birthday.
"Jan and Maria have fallen in love (via the internet) and Jan wishes to mail her a ring. Unfortunately, they live in the country of Kleptopia where anything sent through the mail will be stolen unless it is enclosed in a padlocked box. Jan and Maria each have plenty of padlocks, but none to which the other has a key. How can Jan get the ring safely into Maria’s hands?"
Step 1: Take the words from the question, and write it down as an equation - 6/n x 5/(n-1) = 1/3 Step 2: Multiply the 6 by the 5 and the n by the n-1. That gives you: 30/(n^2 - n) = 1/3 Step 3: Multiply the top-left by bottom-right and top-right by bottom-left Step 4: Subtract 90 from both sides, leading to your answer n^2 - n - 90 = 0
When is Cheryl's birthday?
The answer
You should create a table of four columns with the months at the top and the dates Cheryl gives after. "You can rule out some of the options. For Albert to have known the answer, he would have to have May and June as that is when 19 or 18 occur." The number 14 is the only one in both months but Bernard is now sure of the birth date. This means Bernard knows it is July 16.
The cruel exam question
The answer
The answer depends on what type of person you are. "In reality, if too many people overuse a common resource then everyone in the group suffers," said the professor who set it.
Why 5+5+5 doesn’t always make 15
The answer
A student was marked down for using the solution 5+5+5, with the teacher noting the correct working out should be shown as 3+3+3+3+3 using the repeated addition strategy.
The 50 cent conundrum
The answer
360 degrees in a circle divided by 12 x 2 coins = 60
Example questions from the 'hardest test in the world'
Did the left or right win the twentieth century?
"Secure people dare". Do they?
Should intellectuals tweet?
Should prisoners be allowed to watch television?
How can words be beautiful?
Can we be forced to be free?
Is the financial sector larger than it should be?
Can policy rely on human rationality?
Is there an economic case for limiting pay bonuses to twice an annual salary?
Should the state restrict what people should do with their pension savings?
Is homelessness a reflection of a badly functioning economy?
Would an inflation target of 4% be better than 2%?
How do apologies work?
Does the status quo have any moral privilege?
Can emotions be reasons for decisions?
Can there be substantive disagreement in the absence of fact?
What is the connection between knowing something and being certain of it?
Is meaning best understood via the concept of truth?
How can someone know what they will do tomorrow if they do not know that they will not have a heart attack before tomorrow arrives?
Who should pay for the costs of educating and bringing up children?
They’ve been making movies for over 30 years—ever since they blew critics away with 1984’s Blood Simplewhile still in their twenties. They’ve won Oscars (for Fargo and No Country for Old Men) and they’ve landed prizes at Cannes (including for Barton Fink and Inside Llewyn Davis). But still there’s something eternally playful and youthful about the Coen brothers. Here, we look back at two careers (one, really) steeped in movie history and streaked with an unmistakable dark humor. And if you enjoy this, why not look back at our celebrations of two other American auteurs, Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allen? So, be like the Dude, and abide with our choices of the best Coen brothers movies so far…
Keep an eye out for the films that follow up the Coens’ big successes; those projects are often their most daring. After Fargo, few expected the brothers to double down on a fully baked L.A. detective story featuring a tubby stoner hero (the immortal Jeff Bridges), a howling Vietnam vet (John Goodman) and a kinship with that shaggiest of ’70s classics, The Long Goodbye. It’s their most intensely beloved film.—JR
For proof that the Coen’s masterpiece of black comedy has stood the test of time just look at the fact that nearly twenty years since its release we’ve had two seasons of a new TV series based on this wry story of small-town crime. And while the remake is good, no one beats Frances McDormand as the Minnesota police chief investigating a triple murder. And the Oscar for Most Inventive Use of a Woodchipper goes to…—CC
Always dogged by the criticism of excessive caricaturing, the Coens took a leap into the unknown with this Book of Job–like reminiscence, inspired, in part, by their own ’60s Jewish boyhoods. It vibrates with humor, sadness and a scary mystique (“Accept the mystery” is a key line of dialogue).—JR
The Coens’ feature debut is notably lacking in wacky asides and goofy megastar cameos: this is a terse, relentless Southern Gothic thriller steeped in neo-noir nastiness. M. Emmett Walsh’s sleazy private dick is the first great Coen character, and the brutal grave scene displays the influence of early collaborator Sam Raimi.—TH
Down-on-his-luck folk singer Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac), the film’s ungracious, self-regarding anti-hero, was too much for some. But this is the Coens at their most dark, somber and moving: this 1960s-set downbeat odyssey is uncompromising and wise in its reflections on talent, success, disappointment and living life as an artist. The sense of time and place is exquisite; the soundtrack is a complete joy; and the movie offers a special gift to cat lovers.—DC
Darker than your average Coens movie, the brothers adapted No Country for Old Men from novelist Cormac McCarthy’s western thriller. Josh Brolin stars as a Vietnam vet who finds a case containing $2 million (and the bodies of several Mexicans) at the scene of a drug deal gone sour. It was a career-high for the Coens, with brilliant performances from Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem as a psychopathic hitman with a pageboy bob. It scooped four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director.—CC
That hoary old maxim “write what you know” is brilliantly picked apart in the Coens’ first golden-age Hollywood adventure. John Turturro is wonderfully twitchy as the titular playwright slumming it on scripts for wrestling pictures. But it’s John Goodman who blows the film apart as his grotesque neighbor Muntz.—TH
The Runyonesque dialogue alone is enough to qualify this Irish-gangster pic as a cult fave. But here, too, is one of the Coens’ most emotionally sophisticated stories, deceptively powerful, about loyalty between surrogate fathers and sons. The script was reportedly so difficult for them to crack, they wrote Barton Fink as a diversion.—JR
This was the first of two Coens road movies built around a love of American music of a certain period; the second was Inside Llewyn Davis. Here, the brothers tell the 1930s-set story of an escaped prisoner (George Clooney) and his companions (John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson) running into various mishaps in the Deep South, with ample breaks for bluegrass, blues and gospel. The brothers loosely based their tale on Homer’s Odyssey.—DC
After The Ladykillers, the very idea of the Coens remaking another classic had many pundits shaking their heads. But True Grit is more of a return to Charles Portis’ source novel than a reboot of the John Wayne oater. Jeff Bridges is on fine form as irascible US Marshall Rooster Cogburn, but 14-year-old Hailee Steinfeld steals the show as the vengeful orphan who hires him.—TH
Working for the first time with a serious budget—andLethal Weapon producer Joel Silver—the Coens managed to produce their first outright flop, a $25-million screwball comedy about the invention of the hula hoop. The sets are incredible, the dialogue crackles and Tim Robbins was never more lovable—but who ever thought this was going to be a hit?—TH
Quiet, compelling and hard-to-read: that description applies as much to the movie itself as to its lead character, a barber (Billy Bob Thornton) in postwar California who’s drawn into a murder plot that tips its hat to 1930s crime writer James M. Cain. It’s less a thriller and more a subdued, thoughtful character study. Best of all, it’s presented in glorious, noir-inspired black and white.—DC
The fact that Raising Arizona ranks near the bottom of this list says less about its quality and more about the Coens’ 30-year track record for churning out more hits than misses. After making their reputation as America’s most exciting young auteurs with their debutBlood Simple (1984), along came this baby-snatching caper. Nicolas Cage stars as the armed robber who falls in love with his prison officer (Holly Hunter) and steals a quintuplet when nature fails to take its course in the baby-making department.—CC
It’s one of the less essential Coen brothers movies, but there’s still fun to be gained from this cynical farce about a small group of very stupid people caught up in a blackmail and espionage yarn involving a retired CIA operative (John Malkovich), his mislaid memoirs, his wife (Tilda Swinton), her lover (George Clooney) and two dumb but ambitious gym employees (Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt). Coming after the straight-faced No Country for Old Men, it disappointed some fans, but there’s ample wit and energy here.—DC
Call it an old-fashioned romantic comedy if you must. But can you name another one that dives so deeply into the world of bickering divorce attorneys, iron-clad "pre-nups," Texas billionaires, phony barons and TV soap stars? Swirling at the center in a flirtation that resembles sharks circling are George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones.—JR
There had to be a worst Coen brothers movie—and even diehard fans must admit that something went wrong with this remake of the 1955 British black comedy. Tom Hanks had some big shoes to fill taking on Alec Guinness's role as a phoney professor who rents a room from a little old lady while plotting a devilish scheme. Not exactly his finest hour—or the Coens’.—CC
Comment
