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Post by Dante on Aug 19, 2014 2:16:22 GMT -5
Possibly because they aren't really puzzles. They're either creative writing exercises, or impossible to solve for the single "intended" answer. Tryina's local riddle is not dissimilar; you could argue that because we're given no information about the man's hair, that we should assume that it does not exist, but the question itself presupposes the existence of hair and indeed a direction in which it is blowing.
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Post by gliquey on Aug 19, 2014 9:10:50 GMT -5
Tryina's local riddle is not dissimilar; you could argue that because we're given no information about the man's hair, that we should assume that it does not exist On the contrary, I'd logically assume whatever is most likely to be the case. For instance, since most people have legs, I would assume the person on the boat has legs. The "person on a boat" has a 50% chance of being male, but most men have hair, so baldness is not likely. The person has a 50% chance of being female, and baldness is much rarer in women, so baldness is not likely for women either. Overall, you would assume the average person has hair, so the answer to the riddle is statistically unlikely. But the point of lateral thinking is to challenge something you might assume, so it doesn't necessarily have to be likely. For instance, I've heard this one before:
A father and his son are in a car crash. The father is killed and the son is injured, so gets taken to hospital for an operation. The surgeon says, "I can't operate on this boy: he's my son". How is this possible? The surgeon is the boy's mother, challenging the assumption many people make that a doctor of unspecified gender is male.
Another possible answer I've come up with is that the child has two gay "fathers" - although they wouldn't both be biological fathers, adoption and surrogacy allows gay couples to still be parents.
Statistically, a surgeon is more likely to be male than female (although not much more likely), but the idea is that you shouldn't assume someone's gender by their occupation. For my proposed solution, most humans are heterosexual rather than homosexual (or bisexual), but it's still something you shouldn't assume about a person.
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Post by A comet crashing into Earth on Aug 19, 2014 10:21:08 GMT -5
I think it could be argued that since Tryina's question includes the phrasing 'his hair', it is directly (and, of course, wrongly) implied that he does have hair. I wouldn't have been surprised to see that kind of riddle in Puzzles. However, most people just get pissed off by questions like "Why did the man die after moving to Sweden?" Because he obviously couldn't have moved there after dying. =P
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Post by gliquey on Aug 19, 2014 10:33:05 GMT -5
I think it could be argued that since Tryina's question includes the phrasing 'his hair', it is directly (and, of course, wrongly) implied that he does have hair. I said this for the Crack the Case puzzle, and I'll say it again: the person almost certainly has hair, just not on the top of their head. Then again, maybe even chest/armpit/facial/more unpleasantly located hair would still move with the wind. Is this person completely hairless? Sounds like a thrilling new addition to the House of Freaks in the Caligari Carnival.
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Post by Tryina Denouement on Aug 20, 2014 14:59:09 GMT -5
I think it could be argued that since Tryina's question includes the phrasing 'his hair', it is directly (and, of course, wrongly) implied that he does have hair. I said this for the Crack the Case puzzle, and I'll say it again: the person almost certainly has hair, just not on the top of their head. Then again, maybe even chest/armpit/facial/more unpleasantly located hair would still move with the wind. Is this person completely hairless? Sounds like a thrilling new addition to the House of Freaks in the Caligari Carnival. The problem is that the Indonesian language only uses gender neutral pronouns when referring to a person as 'he' or 'she' so the person's gender is not specified. This is why the translation looks slightly redundant. The hair specified here is the hair on the head, others are not counted. Also, yeah, a hairless person is a good addition there.
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