***SPOILER WARNING*** PEOPLE WILL BE POSTING ANSWERS IN THE THREAD. DO NOT READ BEYOND THE ORIGINAL POST IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO SPOIL THE PROBLEM

There are 5 houses in 5 different colors. In each house lives a person with a different nationality. The 5 owners drink a certain type of beverage, smoke a certain brand of cigar, and keep a certain pet. No owners have the same pet, smoke the same brand of cigar, or drink the same beverage.

Somebody owns a fish. The question is: who?

Hints:

The Brit lives in the red house.
The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
The Dane drinks tea.
The green house is on the left and next to the white house.
The green homeowner drinks coffee.
The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds.
The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
The man living in the center house drinks milk.
The Norwegian lives in the first house.
The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
The man who keeps the horse lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
The owner who smokes Bluemaster drinks beer.
The German smokes Prince.
The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.

***SPOILER WARNING*** PEOPLE WILL BE POSTING ANSWERS IN THE THREAD. DO NOT READ BEYOND THE ORIGINAL POST IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO SPOIL THE PROBLEM

Nice. Thanks. Do we post the answer or just message you?

The question is, what has this puzzle got to do with math?

It's a logic problem. That qualifies.

You can go ahead and post if you'd like. I edited my OP with a spoiler warning.

Math is a very broad term that is too often confused with arithmetic. You don't need to be working with numbers, formulae or equations to be doing math.

Solved. Good fun, thnx.

It took a little while. Half way through the clues I had to merge some together in order to fit :-)

The answer to your question is: the German has fish.

The full puzzles is solved to:
1st house; yellow, Norwegian, water, Dunhill, cats
2nd house; blue, Dane, tea, Blends, horse
3rd (mid) house; red, Brit, milk, Pall Mall, birds
4th house; green, German, coffee, Prince, fish
5th house; white, Swede, beer, Bluemaster, dogs.

This is a simple yet well thought out puzzle; if you do it right it does not involve any trial and error.

Solution:

The Norwegian lives in the first house.
The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
The Brit lives in the red house.
The green house is on the left and next to the white house.
The green homeowner drinks coffee.
The man living in the center house drinks milk.
The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
The man who keeps the horse lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.

The Norwegian lives in the first house, so the Blue house definitely comes second. Since the Green house has to be on the left of the White house, and the man living in the center house drinks milk, the Green house has to be the fourth house as the homeowner drinks coffee. Since the Brit lives in the Red house, it has to be the third one as the Norwegian is already in the first. Being the first house (Yellow), the Norwegian who smokes Dunhill has only one neighbor, and he is the one keeping the horse.

Information:
Yellow-Norwegian-Dunhill
Blue-Horse
Red-Brit-Milk
Green-Coffee
White

The rest is simple deduction. The colors in the brackets are the possible houses the hint can be associated with given what we know so far:

The owner who smokes Bluemaster drinks beer. (Blue, White)
The Swede keeps dogs as pets. (Green, White)
The Dane drinks tea. (Blue, White)
The German smokes Prince. (Blue, Green, White)
The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds. (Red, Green, White)

The owner who smokes Bluemaster has to be the Swede, since we know the Dane and Brit do not drink beer, and the German and Norwegian are already smoking something else. Therefore, he is the owner of the White house. The Dane can only be from the Blue house now, leaving the German with the Green house. The person who smokes Pall Mall is the Brit, since the German smokes Prince and the Swede smokes Bluemaster.

Information:
Yellow-Norwegian-Dunhill
Blue-Dane-Horse-Tea
Red-Brit-Birds-Milk-Pall Mall
Green-German-Coffee-Prince
White-Swede-Dog-Beer-Bluemaster

The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.

The Dane smokes Blends. Therefore the cat lover and water sipper has to be the Norwegian, and we can conclude that the owner of the fish is the German.

Lymz summarized it much faster :P

Hehehe, it's not a race. just4thebonuspts posted the thought process. I basically did the same thing. I had to merge "The owner who smokes Bluemaster drinks beer." and "The Swede keeps dogs as pets." by process of elimination. Everything else fit into place after that.

It's good to see someone came up with the same answer; double check my work, and that there's only 1 solution :-)

ack, my brain x.x

I meant that his took up 50 lines and yours 5 :P

Yeah. It was fun. I got it from another teacher's blog. I enjoyed it. I'm a very visual person... I like to see the whole problem at once, so what I did was write each of the 25 colours/pets/smokes/drinks/nationalities on small strips of paper and had 5 larger pieces of paper representing the houses. I paired together all of the ones that I knew had to be together, and then I started placing items on the houses as I knew where they needed to go, starting with milk in the middle. The thing that took me a few tries to figure out was that Norwegian being first didn't necessarily mean he had to be on the far left. Once I put him on the far right, everything else fit into place quite nicely.

I hat mathN

hmmmm

Fair reply. Good puzzle.

Zeeee German haz ze fish.

@hawkeye: I used to do lots of those logic puzzles as a kid. Later in life I learned about something called "recursion" which lets you solve it using a computer.
You know that sudoku is essentially that type of puzzle with numbers rather than works?:P

I remember making those little logic grids to solve them as well:p

I did the same thing, only in a spreadsheet, hahaha!



Yup, pretty much a 5x5 sudoku. I have a "puzzle" calendar at my desk, quite often I get logic ones, and I'll use my deductive reasoning skills (sharpened by sudoku) to solve them.