Ambassador riddle - anyone know the answer?

[lagvoid]

I was looking through archived riddle threads on AT and came across this one posted by (TCPpacket) back in 2003. He doesn't have the answer on hand any longer and I can't find it on google either. Does anyone know the answer or want to take a crack at it? I have my solution so PM me if you want to compare!


_________


There are five men with the first names of Alan, Erwin, Howard, Peter, and Randy. The last names of these five men are Carter, Kneech, Morley, Stamey, and Vance. Note that these last names are not in any given order and may be the last names of any of the men. Each of these five men will be the ambassadors of one of the five following countries: France, Italy, Germany, Russia, and Spain. Between the five men, each of them speak one of the following languages: French, Italian, German, Russian, and Spanish. The catch is, the ambassador of a certain country does not speak that language (i.e. the ambassador of Germany does not speak German). I'll put it in an easier to understand format:

FIRST NAME: Alan, Erwin, Howard, Peter, Randy

LAST NAME: Carter, Kneech, Morley, Stamey, Vance

AMBASSADOR TO: France, Italy, Germany, Russia, Spain

LANGUAGES: French, Italian, German, Russian, Spanish

Finally, we are given the following facts about the men:

(1) Neither Peter, Erwin, nor Mr. Kneesh are ambassador to Spain.

(2) Neither Howard, nor the ambassador to Italy speak Russian or German.

(3) Neither the man who speaks Italian, nor Mr. Vance will be ambassador to France.

(4) Mr. Stamey, Mr. Kneech, the man who speaks Spanish, Randy, and the ambassador to Italy are all differrent people.

(5) Howard, Mr. Carter, Alan, the ambassador to Russia, and the man who speaks Italian are all different people.

(6) Peter does not speak German.

 

[MichaelD]

It was Doctor Sigmund in the Kitchen with the Butcher Knife.




Your riddle requires way too much thinking. The rest of the ADD-afflicted of ATOT will not be of much help.

 

[xSauronx]

Originally posted by: MichaelD
It was Doctor Sigmund in the Kitchen with the Butcher Knife.




Your riddle requires way too much thinking. The rest of the ADD-afflicted of ATOT will not be of much help.

this is the only part of this thread that i read.

and the part where i had to edit it because i spelled "this" as "thsi" but thats it!

 

[PokerGuy]

This is a "logic grid" type puzzle. There is/was a company that produced books full of 'logicwiz' puzzles like this, they generally aren't very difficult if you tackle them systematically.

 

[lagvoid]

I thought I'd give AT a shot, but maybe it's still too early. It is very time consuming (hours).

 

[Ika]

Originally posted by: PokerGuy
This is a "logic grid" type puzzle. There is/was a company that produced books full of 'logicwiz' puzzles like this, they generally aren't very difficult if you tackle them systematically.

Yep, I used to do them back in the day. I could write this one out but I'm too lazy

 

[eLiu]

These are easy albeit potentially time consuming.

Draw out a table with one property for the rows (first names for example), and then let the other properties form the columns. Then start filling what you know and the table will help you infer the rest.

It may not be the fastest method, but it always works... hell I could do it in middle school.

 

[DrPizza]

Originally posted by: lagvoid
I thought I'd give AT a shot, but maybe it's still too early. It is very time consuming (hours).

hours?!!
I'd think that anyone with even slightly above average intelligence would be able to solve that in a couple of minutes.

 

[Lonyo]

Well the ambassador to Italy speaks French I think.
That's all I can be bothered to do.

 

[JohnCU]

are you sure thats all the info?

 

[cKGunslinger]

Originally posted by: DrPizza

Originally posted by: lagvoid
I thought I'd give AT a shot, but maybe it's still too early. It is very time consuming (hours).

hours?!!
I'd think that anyone with even slightly above average intelligence would be able to solve that in a couple of minutes.

Yeah, once you get the grid, it usually only takes a couple of re-reads of the clues and some logical intutition to finish it up in a few minutes.

This is not really a forum-friendly logic puzzle..

 

[mflacy]

Well, the only thing I can determine for sure is that Howard is the ambassador for France and there is a 50% shot his last name is Kneech.

So, I'll just guess the rest:

Alan Vance - Italy
Peter Carter - Germany
Randy Morely - Spain
Erwin Stanley - Russia
Howard Kneech - France

 

[dullard]

Unless I made a stupid error:

Alan Kneech is the French ambassador who speaks Russian.
Erwin Stamey is the Russian ambassador who speaks German.
Howard Vance is the German ambassador who speaks Spanish.
Peter Carter is the Italian ambassador who speaks French.
Randy Morley is the Spanish ambassador who speaks Italian.

This one truely does take an hour because guessing is involved and then you have to run your guess to its conclusion to see if the guess was accurate. It you guess intelligently at the beginning, you'll minimize the pain, but it is still a guessing game to start with. But it is basically just another Sodoku problem that is all the rage now.

 

[Born2bwire]

Originally posted by: dullard
Unless I made a stupid error:

Alan Kneech is the French ambassador who speaks Russian.
Erwin Stamey is the Russian ambassador who speaks German.
Howard Vance is the German ambassador who speaks Spanish.
Peter Carter is the Italian ambassador who speaks French.
Randy Morley is the Spanish ambassador who speaks Italian.

This one truely does take an hour because guessing is involved and then you have to run your guess to its conclusion to see if the guess was accurate. It you guess intelligently at the beginning, you'll minimize the pain, but it is still a guessing game to start with. But it is basically just another Sodoku problem that is all the rage now.

You should not need to guess, you can finish this problem with exact determinations. Sometimes the trick is to see what something can't be and by extension find out what it also can't be.

 

[dullard]

Originally posted by: Born2bwire
You should not need to guess, you can finish this problem with exact determinations. Sometimes the trick is to see what something can't be and by extension find out what it also can't be.

Or do it in 1/10th the time by guessing once and back-proving your guess.

 

[lagvoid]

Originally posted by: dullard
Unless I made a stupid error:

Alan Kneech is the French ambassador who speaks Russian.
Erwin Stamey is the Russian ambassador who speaks German.
Howard Vance is the German ambassador who speaks Spanish.
Peter Carter is the Italian ambassador who speaks French.
Randy Morley is the Spanish ambassador who speaks Italian.

This one truely does take an hour because guessing is involved and then you have to run your guess to its conclusion to see if the guess was accurate. It you guess intelligently at the beginning, you'll minimize the pain, but it is still a guessing game to start with. But it is basically just another Sodoku problem that is all the rage now.

This is what I got as well. It takes more time than the simple einstein one.

To the other poster, that is all you need to complete the riddle.

 

[ViviTheMage]

these are fun! but I havent the time to do it , sorry.

 

[Born2bwire]

Originally posted by: dullard

Originally posted by: Born2bwire
You should not need to guess, you can finish this problem with exact determinations. Sometimes the trick is to see what something can't be and by extension find out what it also can't be.

Or do it in 1/10th the time by guessing once and back-proving your guess.

Took me 15 minutes. /Shrug

 

[dullard]

Originally posted by: Born2bwire
Took me 15 minutes. /Shrug

Well you must have a great mind for this type of work. It took me 15 minutes just to read the problem, write down the names, write down the known data, and post it here. 15 minutes wouldn't be enough to do anything else for me.

 

[jme5343]

Originally posted by: Born2bwire

Originally posted by: dullard

Originally posted by: Born2bwire
You should not need to guess, you can finish this problem with exact determinations. Sometimes the trick is to see what something can't be and by extension find out what it also can't be.

Or do it in 1/10th the time by guessing once and back-proving your guess.

Took me 15 minutes. /Shrug

Took me 14 minutes. /Shrug...

(First liar never has a chance )

 

[Born2bwire]

Originally posted by: dullard

Originally posted by: Born2bwire
Took me 15 minutes. /Shrug

Well you must have a great mind for this type of work. It took me 15 minutes just to read the problem, write down the names, write down the known data, and post it here. 15 minutes wouldn't be enough to do anything else for me.

I did these a lot as a kid. I had a teacher that would have us do them at least once a week. So as stated previously, you set up a system of grids to show the relationships between all the data. There are four groups of data (first names, last names, languages, and countries) so you have a three groups of data in each column and row, and six intersections between two different groups. Once you go through and put through all of the information that is given in the problem (in addition to noting that country != country's language), you work through and look at what you can eliminate given any assignments that you start with. I think you start out knowing that the ambassador to Italy speaks French. So now you go through and see who can't be Italy and who can't speak French and make more eliminations. Then you know that Howard must speak Spanish. So then you go through and match up the eliminations that Howard and the Spanish speaker can't have and so on and so on.

 

[CarlKillerMiller]

I would attempt it, but
A: The puzzle would take a long time
B: It was posted by some guy on the internet, which means that a missing word could make it unsolveable and a waste of time.