The Zebra Puzzle

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The Zebra Puzzle


The Zebra Puzzle is a logical game in which you have to use a series of clues to solve it and at the end you can answer Who owns the Zebra. There are many variants and this is one of them:


  1. There are five houses.
  2. The English man lives in the red house.
  3. The Swede has a dog.
  4. The Dane drinks tea.
  5. The green house is immediately to the left of the white house.
  6. They drink coffee in the green house.
  7. The man who smokes Pall Mall has birds.
  8. In the yellow house they smoke Dunhill.
  9. In the middle house they drink milk.
  10. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
  11. The man who smokes Blend lives in the house next to the house with cats.
  12. In a house next to the house where they have a horse, they smoke Dunhill.
  13. The man who smokes Blue Master drinks beer.
  14. The German smokes Prince.
  15. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
  16. They drink water in a house next to the house where they smoke Blend.

Who owns the zebra?

It is a fun puzzle and you should try to solve it. For sure you will have a good moment. But if you want help, scroll down for the solution.
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Solution

 First, organize clues logically by each variable


Next you can create a table with 5 columns (one for each house) and 5 rows (for each variable), and then allocate the clues in the table.

 Start with the easy ones:

 Clue 10 & 15: The Norwegian lives in the first house and next to the blue house (house 2).
Clue 9: They drink milk in the middle house (house 3).
Clue 5 & 6: Because they drink coffee in the green house and the green house is immediately to the left of the white house, the only houses available are 4 and 5.
Clue 2: The Englishman lives in the red house. The only house left where color and nationality is available is house 3.
The remaining color is yellow and it is placed in house 1 as this is the only house not given a color.
Clue 8: In the yellow house they smoke Dunhill. We had just assigned yellow to house 1.
With the clue 11 we can read that in the house next to the house with cats, they smokes Blend. This means that there is only one house next to the house where the cats lives, meaning it is either house 1 or house 5. Let's try with cats in house 5. As clue 11 stated that the man who smoke Blend lives in the house next to the cats, he will live in house 4. Clue 16 states that they drink water in a house next to the house where they smoke Blend, meaning they drink water in either house 3 or 5; however we have already allocated milk as the drink in house 3, why water is placed in house 5.
Clue 13 states that the man who smokes BlueMaster also drinks beer. The only option for this is house 2 as shown below.
Here we have a problem, because according to clue 4, the Dane drinks Tea and the combination of nationality and drink is no longer available. 
We therefore take a few steps back to clue 11 and places the cats in house 1 instead of house 5.
Also we complete the other clues described in the section above.
Cat sand Water in house 1, next to the house where they smoke Blend (house 2). BlueMaster and Beer can now only be placed in house 5 and we now see that the combination of nationality and drink is available in house 2, where we place Dane and Tea as stated in clue 4.

 We now continue with the remaining clues...

 Clue 14: The German smokes Prince. The only remaining combination of nationality and smoke is in house 4, where we place the German and Prince.
Clue 3: The Swede has a dog. Only combination left of nationality and animal is house 5.
Clue 7: The man who smokes Pall Mall has birds. This combination is available in house 3.

 Using all clues we get the following result:

 The German owns the zebra!!! 💪😀

There is also a solution using Microsoft Excel and Solver Function, and only takes 31.67 secs to get the result. 
Click to get the file:

 Zebra Puzzle with Excel

Source: 
Wikipedia
www.researchgate.net

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