You have 8 cards (pieces of paper) numbered from 1 to 8. The first 4 are all white, and the last 4 are all black. On each one is written:

#1: The next two cards are black.
#2: The next two cards are of different colors.
#3: The previous card has the same color as the next.
#4: There are the same number of black cards before and after this one.
#5: The previous card is of the same color as the next.
#6: The previous card is white.
#7: The next two cards are of the same color.
#8: The previous card is black.

Arrange the 8 cards in a row so that all the sentences result truthfully.

(In reply to re(2): Logical solution by Charlie)

You´re right, Charlie, I´m from the time of the first COBOL, which came just before the Assembler. By that time, after the college I went to the giant of informatic, IBM, where I received all the training in such languages. And, yes, I remember "alter xxx to proceeed to yyy".

I face a great problem in my professional life in Informatic - after leaving IBM - and accepting a friend´s invitation to install what would be the Informatic Department of an enterprise. We were linked to the govern and for every single pencil we wanted buy, there should be a public licitation. And each one took a couple of years to receive the approval.

I remember that, since I always liked puzzles, one of the first I programmed it was the well-known "Game of Nim", and the player used the main keyboard to transmit informations to the giant computer of 48 Kb-main memory!!!!!

I know that, more than known a good language or the appropriate language to solve a problem, one must have a great skill in reasoning, to find the way to "attack" the problem, or any problem. And you know that. You may give an Excell to a person, and nothing will happen.

Unfortunatelly, my professional life today doesn´t give me time to learn languages like Visual Basic, or UBasic, as you said, and the problems I have to solve doesn´t need such knowledge.

The comment I made is more to show my "surprise"; it seems there are no limits to the language, but the language itself need a highly skilled professional on how to use it.    

Posted by pcbouhid on 2009-02-01 16:47:11