Recursive Puzzle (Posted on 2006-08-23)

	Submitted by Tristan
Rating: 4.4000 (5 votes)
Solution:	(Hide)
The puzzle would have originally given six clues, but three of them have been damaged. In order for the first person to have been able to solve it, none of clues could have been redundant (because it is impossible to match four pairs of objects with less than six clues of this sort). Let's draw a standard logic grid, except there will be question marks on the sides to indicate that a non-redundant x belongs somewhere in that row or column. 1 2 3 4 blue aqua x teal x x cyan ? ? ? What is required in order for all six clues to be non-redundant? There must be 3 Xs in one column, 2 in another, 1 in another, and none in the last. Similarly, there must be rows with 3, 2, 1, and 0 Xs. With this in mind, there are only really six possibilities to check. For each possibility, imagine you were the third person, and check that the puzzle is solvable when you know one of the clues. This should be enough to eliminate all but one possibility, but I will skip these details. The only colors or numbers that can be crossed out are "cyan" in the third paragraph, and either "four" in the third paragraph, though this is perhaps debatable. 1 - cyan 2 - teal 3 - blue 4 - aqua

	Subject	Author	Date
	Puzzle Answer	K Sengupta	2023-09-11 23:12:11
	re(2): Solution for first part (figuring out the wires)	Dej Mar	2006-08-24 15:18:50
	re(2): Solution for first part (figuring out the wires)	Avin	2006-08-24 08:52:13
	re: Solution for first part (figuring out the wires)	bumble	2006-08-23 17:47:45
	Solution for first part (figuring out the wires)	Avin	2006-08-23 16:35:32