Build a large, heavy pendulum and tie a rope to it and to one of the switches. One bulb is one, one off, one going on-off-on-off.
Turn on two swtiches, connect a strong current to one circuit. Go to the other room to see one off, one on, one burnt out.
Turn on two switches, go to the other room, unscrew a bulb, go back, pull the panel off the switches to expose the wires underneath, lick the circuits for the “on” switches to find out which has a complete circuit.
Offer the building superintendent a shiny new barometer to tell you which switch is which.
i hear the blueprints for the building are in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “beware of the leopard.”
The puzzle about the missiles is actually very easy.
The technique is to realise that ‘You must solve it without pencil and paper’ is a superset of ‘You must solve it using google’.
Lateral thinking problems are really very easy if you truly permit yourself to think laterally.
Lateral Thinking puzzles frequently stoke rage in even calm people, because they aren’t about being creative; they are about figuring out what actually happened in a specific case from the past. The are true stories, so there’s no deviation from it (like bending the paper with this puzzle).
I’m on team teacher. There was no specific rule saying you can’t cut out all the dots and glue them back down in a straight line either, but I bet the author wouldn’t have accepted that as a solution.
If you want a creative solution that involves folding the paper, roll it into a tube and draw a line round and round the tube that eventually passes through all dots. I bet the teacher would have accepted that as a good solution, even if it’s not the one she was looking for.
Using a pen so thick it can draw multiple lines at once is just dumb
To me if you take the folding-the-paper solution and the draw-lines-that-extend-beyond-the-box-defined-by-the-dots solution they are both equal in breaking unspoken rules. In one case it’s “I never said you couldn’t fold it, you just assumed that” and in the other it’s “I never said you couldn’t draw a line that goes outside the box, you just assumed that.”
If I can think of both solutions there is no way for me to guess which one is going to be “right”. Basically people are suggesting that their breaking of intuition is the right breaking of intuition. There is not objective way of assessing that, so it’s communicating badly and then being smug when you are misunderstood to me.
ETA: What the teacher should have said was, “Oh, that’s clever. What if I told you that I had a solution where you didn’t have to fold the paper?”
I actually encountered this one in a Job Interview once. It was not the worst interview I’ve had, but it’s near the bottom.
My problem with the lightbulb puzzle is similar to others. The person giving the puzzle has a certain amount of constraints in mind when they issue the challenge, but aren’t willing to put in the work to properly define those constraints, since they already know the answer. This allows them to treat any solution that doesn’t reach the same conclusion as wrong, which is not teaching anything other that the specific solution they have in mind. I would further propose that they are not teaching anything at all.
I’m not sure whether I like this problem or not, but I’ve remembered it for 30+ years:
A Man lay dead with two sticks in his head. How did he die?
I appreciate the simplicity of it, in any case.
Here’s the solution, if you’re curious:
The two sticks are Popsicle(Ice Pop, Iced Lollies?) sticks. The man ate a poisoned twin pop (essentially two pops fused together) and died. The sticks are presumably in his mouth.
I remember this with some fondness, as it was presented as a group exercise, and used to generate discussion. The actual answer was the least interesting part, in retrospect.
Oh dear, I thought the answer was going to be “The same way as everyone else dies—his brain and body stopped functioning.” I’m becoming too untrusting of puzzles.
