Who Owns The Fish? A logic challenge - just for fun

Its coming to the end of the school year here so the kids are enjoying some slack in lessons. Anyway, they were given this little logic task, with the first correct answer winning a small prize.

According to the source, Albert Einstein reckoned that 98% of folk couldn't complete it. I managed it after a few fudged attempts with scraps of paper and coloured pens, but I switched to Excel and found it easier to move things around, and then things snapped in to place quite quickly.

If anyone wants to test themselves, here's the puzzle: http://www.mathsisfun.com/logicpuzzle.html

Have fun!

Nice one.. will comment after scrutinizing more.

That was challenging. I decided to just write notes, rather than organize it in Excel or something. It took me over an hour. But now I know the answer. I'll send you a PM, Beverley, to compare notes.


Is there supposed to be a time limit with this?


I also kept thinking about writing a PHP program that would do it for me. I don't know if it would have gone faster or not (programming it would've probably taken much longer than just doing it by hand), but that would've been cheating anyway. I also have been trying to think of whether there's any way to use math, and I can't think of it-- there must be something related to systems of equations (this is just a five-dimensional puzzle, after all), but I can't think of how that would work. I think it would involve something like 5^5 equations. That probably wouldn't be simpler.