Einstein's riddle solution

If you are just curious to find the answer, take a look at the bottom of the page.

You can solve the problem by making a table. At the very top of the table you should write the numbers of the houses – from 1 to 5, as each number should corresponds to the position of the house, as 1 is the leftmost and the 5 is the rightmost house. When you’re done with the house numbers, in each column you need to place the main attributes: nationality, color of the house, cigarettes brand, drink, animal.

When you make the table, you should fill those things that you know. We know few things right from the start:

• The owner of the house in the middle (#3) drinks milk.
• The Norwegian lives in the first house.
• The Norwegian lives next to the blue house, which means house #2 is blue, because the Norwegian lives in the leftmost house.

Now, when we filled in the info, do you notice anything? One of the conditions is: The green house is directly to the left of the white house.

The owner of the green house drinks coffee, which means that the green house is impossible to be in the middle, because the owner of the middle house is drinking milk. Since the blue house is second, the green and white houses cannot be first or second (because the green one must be immediately to the left of the white house), leading to the houses being the fourth and fifth.

When we know that, we can fill in more things in the table:

• The owner of the green house is drinking coffee.
• The Brit lives in the red house, which means that the missing color (yellow) should be the house color of the Norwegian. Leading to the fact that the Brit lives in the third house, and from the requirement is said to be red.

After filling in the last details, we can find something else that finds its place:

• The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.

Now, from the condition „The horse owner lives next to the owner who smokes Dunhill.”, we can conclude that the owner of the second house has a horse, because we already found that the Norwegian is the one who smokes Dunhill and he has only one neighbor.

Maybe this is the part where some people would find it more difficult. From here on, to correctly solve the problem, we must write down the possible variants in the cells and after that from the method of exclusion, to find the correct statements.

Now we can begin eliminating some of the possibilities of what we know.

• The Dane drinks tea. This means that the Norwegian is impossible to be drinking tea, as well as the Dane is impossible to be in house #4, because the owner there is drinking coffee.
• The owner who smokes BlueMaster is drinking beer. The Norwegian is not smoking BlueMaster, which means that he is not drinking beer. When we have this in mind, we’re left only with the fact that he’s drinking water, and we’ll be removing the water as an option for houses #2 and #5. From this statement we can conclude that the houses #3 and #4 cannot have BlueMaster as a cigarette brand, because they are known not to drink beer.

Now we continue to eliminate more options.

• The Swede is a dog owner. This means that in houses #1 and #3 it’s impossible to have a dog as a pet, because the owners are Norwegian and the Brit. Besides, it’s impossible for the Swede to live in house #2 because in that house the owner has a horse as a pet.
• The person who smokes Blends, is having a neighbour who drinks water. From here, we find out that the owner who is smoking Blends is living in house #2, because in house #1 the owner is drinking water, and it’s his only neighbor.

After making the last eliminations, it can be seen that only house number #5 can have BlueMaster as a cigarettes brand, and we found that too.

• The owner who smokes BlueMaster is drinking beer. This means that the beer is for house #5, and the tea remains for house #2.
• The German smokes Prince. This means that in house #2 should be for the Dane, because the owner there is smoking Blends. Also the Brit smokes Pall Mall, and for the brand Prince is left house #4, from which we found is the German. House #5 is left for the Swede.

We found out almost everything but the animals.

We’re almost at the end.

• The owner who smokes Pall Mall, has a bird as a pet. This means that the owner of the bird is the Brit – house #3. We will exclude the bird from all other houses.
• The person who smokes Blends lives next to the house of the cat owner. We already know that in house #3 the owner has a bird, so the cat lives in house #1. So we exclude the cat as an option for everyone else.
• The Swede is a dog owner. This means that the fish is left for the German.

And we are done! The mystery has been solved through the logic and methodology of exclusion without making useless guessing. If you’ve managed to reach this answer without our help, we congratulate you!

The answer to the mystery is that a fish is owned by a German.