Riddles
 

Three brothers check into a hotel. The clerk at the desk tells them that the room will be $30 for the night. Each brother takes a $10 bill out of their pocket and hand it over to the clerk. The Clerk hands them their key, and the bell hop takes the bags and the brothers up to the room.

When the bellhop returns, the clerk, being an honest clerk, tells him that he accidentally overcharged the brothers. The room should have been $25. So he tells the Bell hop to take five $1 bills back up to the brothers.

The bellhop, being of the criminal sort, realizes that there are three brothers, and if he just kept two, each would get one dollar back, and all would be even. So he does. The brothers are happy to get a dollar back, and they thoroughly enjoy their stay.

Now.

Let's do the math. If each brother had laid out ten, and gotten one back, they each spent nine. right? and the bell hop kept two, right. ok. three times nine is twentyseven.....plus two is twentynine. they started with thirty. Where's that other dollar, goddamnit?!

My philosophy teacher presented this particular 'riddle' as proof that lawyers should all be shot - as words and phrasing questions the right way can twist reality.

I'll keep my mouth shut about the answer to this, I want to see someone else tackle the question.:p

The room was $25 for the night for all three of them. The bellhop kept $2. The brothers each got $1 back.

25+2+3=30

"Please enter, my dear Aunt Sally."

Remember your order of operations.

What "other" dollar? Be specific :)

Did the hotel under charge by $1??

the bellhop stole $2, leaving $3 for the boys...
so it is
3 x 10 = 30
30 - 25 = 5
5 - 3 = 2
so $28 dollars have gone to the boys
if its $9 each they pay = 27

the dollar between 29 & 30

I remember "my dear aunt Sally," but what do P & E stand for?

Re: Riddles
 

Sycamore already nailed it, but I'll rephrase it:

Three times nine is twenty-seven... MINUS (not PLUS) the two that the bellhop kept is twenty-five, which is what the actual bill was. The other three dollars from the original $30 are right where they should be, in the brothers' pockets.

Re: Re: Riddles
 

YEP, THAT'S IT


OK SOMEBODY ELSE GIVE UP A RIDDLE

A man is found dead in a field and next to him is a package. If he would have managed to open the package while he was still alive, he would have survived. The package does not contain food, water, or medicine. What's in the package?

A mobile phone?

El Parachuto.

Yay! The lateral puzzles rule.

Close call steve.
based on the info it's impossible to rule either right or wrong IMHO

not familiar with this.....what does it relate to?

A person is found hanged in a room with no ingress or egress points other than a door, locked from the inside. There is nothing in the room except for a puddle of liquid under the corpse,
Murder or suicide? What happened?

Suicide, but I'll let someone else figure out why. :D

vsp nailed it but I had already put this together so I'll post it anyway and thank lumberjim for clearly demonstrating why none of us has a chance in hell once we set foot into the finance manager's office :)

I'll start with a ledger (i.e., something they keep two of in car dealerships :-). Also, I'll make a simplifying assumption and think of the three brothers as one customer. The way the question is worded implies that the person asking is tallying up the dollars and is one short. Everyone's net position is shown before and after each transaction. At any point, the two sides of the ledger when added, must equal zero.


Customer -30, Bellhop ±0 || Hotel +30 (Initial transaction)
Customer_ +3, Bellhop +2 || Hotel_ -5 (The refund)
--------------------------------------------------------
Customer -27, Bellhop +2 || Hotel +25 (The end result)


vsp's answer is now clear - the sign on the 2 and the 27 are not the same so the "29" never existed anywhere but in the question.

it's urine. suicide.

It most assuredly is not urine!

why not? if you kill yourself, you lose control of your bowels, you'd pee, there would be a puddle.

Fuck shit damn piss hell quite right, but wrong, for the purposes of THIS riddle

incidentally, wasn't that Indigo Montoya?

yeah, but as dave so eloquently pointed out, it's actually "inyego"

i love the princess bride...right up there with the holy grail in it's quotablility

Yeah if the question had said "dead apparently due to having slammed into the ground at high speed" the parachute would look like a better answer!

As for the urine/suicide issue, wouldn't the bladder release issue be equally true if somebody else hanged you?

I'm shithouse as far as literal quotes go but I remember many of the scenes, in particular the poisoned goblet switcheroo. Definitely a classic. Had it in my hand at the video store two nights ago but it's so memorable I don't need to watch it again yet.
Incidentally, riddle wise, the liquid was water. The person stood on a block of ice to get in the noose then 'melted' to death.

I'm surprised... all that math you do at work... tho I guess they have computers to handle all the heavy lifting!

My Dear Aunt Sally
Multiplication Division Addition Subtraction

This is the order in which you perform math operations in a situation where you have mixed operations and no parentheses to group things. (So 3 + 4 x 7 is always evaluated as 31, not 49.)

But I don't know what P and E are for... I guess P is Parentheses?

yeah, but the door is locked from the inside.

ok, if it;s not pee, then i give. what is it?

It's a big puddle of REFRESH

yeah. i'd be fucked without my computer. i never heard that particular anagram, but i knew the rules. i was always good at solving word problems, but my teachers always got pissed cuz i rarely showed my work. i kind of sort shit out logically, then apply the results to check accuracy.

It's water. From the ice s/he stood on to hang him/herself.

A melted block of ice.

ok , it's water, but it's pissy water. :)

This riddle comes in the form of a cryptic e-mail.

"Subject: c7362210/828 645 393
Message: please read discrep correct ord & re release i routed to qs que

-renee"

My office -- where people are so lazy with their typing their e-mails become riddles. The meaning? Your guess is as good as mine.

There are 5 houses in a row on a street, all of different colors. In each house lives a person with a different nationality. These 5 owners each drink a certain drink, smoke a certain brand of cigar, and keep a certain pet. No two owners have the same pet, smoke the same brand of cigar, or drink the same drink.

The riddle is -- WHO OWNS THE FISH?

Here is all the information you have to figure it out:
<ul>
<li>the Brit lives in the red house
<li>the Swede keeps dogs as pets
<li>the Dane drinks tea
<li>the green house is on the left of the white house
<li>the green house owner drinks coffee
<li>the person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds
<li>the owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill
<li>the man living in the house right in the center drinks milk
<li>the Norwegian lives in the first house
<li>the man who smokes blends lives next to the one who keeps cats
<li>the man who keeps horses lives next to the one who smokes Dunhill
<li>the owner who smokes Bluemaster drinks beer
<li>the German smokes prince
<li>the Norwegian lives next to the blue house
<li>the man who smokes blends has a neighbor who drinks water.
</ul>

Edit: I forgot to say... the "first" house in the clue above refers to the left-most house.

OH CHRIST

i dont have that kind of time! i'll tell you tomorrow!

Well, ok... here's an easier one in the meantime. This one works better when asked verbally, because it's cool to watch how long it takes someone to think of a solution:

There are three light bulbs in a room with no windows, and a closed door. In front of you are three on-off switches. You know that each switch controls one of the light bulbs inside the room, but you don't know which switch matches which bulb, and they are not wired in any particular order.

Your job is to match each switch to it's bulb. You may only enter the room once, and you may not leave the door open. How do you accomplish your task?

I heard this one from a client of mine... he's a site manager for a Microsoft call center. Apparently, this is one of the questions an interviewer at Microsoft will ask potential employees during an interview, to test their reasoning skills.

He told me about how he was sitting in a management meeting at Microsoft with about twenty other managers when someone posed this very question of the group... he bragged that he was he only one to come up with the answer, and it only took him about twenty minutes. So he put the riddle to my friend and I, and I figured it out almost immediately. I think I stole the pride he'd had in answering it in "only" twenty minutes. Heheh.

Incidentally, my friend later came up with a different answer than I did, which is still a valid solution, but not nearly as elegant.

Edit: I added "on-off" to the description of the switches, to clarify the fact that you know which position will turn the bulb on, and which will turn it off.

maybe this is the easy way out, but just flip all the switches and go in the room. they'll all be on. or open the door before you go in and match the switches to the bulbs.

The German owns the fish.

Yeah, the coffe-drinking, prince-smoking German in the green house! :)

"you may not leave the door open"

Also, flipping ALL the switches on does not indicate which switch goes to which bulb, it just shows that they all work.

Flip the first switch. Wait about 2 minutes. Turn it off, flip the second switch. enter the room. The lit light is controlled by switch 2. The off, but warm light is connected to switch 1. The last light is controlled by 3. :)

He's good. That's the right answer.

My friend's answer was this: Turn on a switch, then leave it on for a few years, enough time that it burns out. Turn on another switch, then enter the room. The burned-out light is switch #1, the light that is on is switch #2, and the light which is off is switch #3. Sloppy, but technically ok.

A man lies dead in a dark alley. Police find him surrounded by 52 bicycles. What happened?

Yup. Knowing the answer in advance doesn't ruin the fun of solving the riddle, though, so anybody who hasn't tried to reason it out yet ought to. It's an interesting exercise in logic.

This riddle is often attributed to Einstein, which is most likely untrue, but I don't know for certain.

Exploding deck of cards?

Close enough. :) Should have mentioned a stab or bullet wound, hunh?

Close enough. Should have mentioned a stab or bullet wound, hunh?

Shows you how broken my brain is, huh? 52 is the number of cards in a deck! Bicycles are a brand of cards! How'd they get everywhere, though? Surely it must have exploded.

He cheated at cards, the table was upended, and he was killed.

You can speed it up by flipping switch one on and off for a few months, instead of leaving it on for years.

And I guess both solutions would be complicated if a bulb was bad to begin with.

Okay, here is one riddle I heard, I think it is from some card game called mindtrap or something like that.


You are locked in a room, only one exit. To get out there is a combination
lock.

There is a circular hole in the ground about two inches in diameter and about five inches deep. At the bottom of the hole is a ping pong ball, with the combination to the lock written on the side.

How do you get out of the room?



Some points of clarifications.

You can't manage to read the combination without getting the ping pong ball into your hands and looking at it real close.

You have no tools. Heck, let's even say you have no clothes either.

Your fingers can't reach in and pluck the ping pong ball out, it's too far in, and your whole hand doesn't fit in the hole.

The room has no resources for you to use. It's an empty bank vault or something equally inhospitable.

Can you pee in the hole to make the ball float up?

Okay, you answered that way too fast!

That's the answer.

I just know the answer because that exact scenario actually happened to me once... and I swore I'd never touch tequila again!

Something about the riddle's explanation made the answer obvious to me for some reason... first I thought maybe you'd put your mouth over the hole and suck it out, but that wouldn't work unless there was an air hole on the bottom, and you had the sucking power of a five-dollar hooker. Then I turned to the universal solution... urine!

Hopefully, the pee won't dissolve the ink :)

Here's one for you math folks.

Escherland has a really cool hotel - it has an infinite number of rooms!

A VIP guest arrives and asks for a room.

Sadly, there is a porn convention going on, and all the rooms are occupied. However, with some room shuffling, the manager does succede in making a room available to provide for the VIP. Oh, and noone was made to share rooms with anyone else either.


How did he do it?

I wonder if there ever was a real life situation where urine was used to accomplish something through its intrinsic properties - aside from writing in snow.

Then again, forget I asked that, that's a stupid question

Well, a hotel with infinite rooms can never be full... there will always be rooms available.

One jumps to mind... It's been used to cool hot mortar tubes in the absence of water.