IQ Test Puzzle

http://www.robmathiowetz.com/

by zvanness • 12 years ago

21 22 12 years ago

cpfohl• 12 years ago

I recommend family counseling. Both Mom and Dad should be able to spend time with their children without supervision from each other...

poopsintub3• 12 years ago

Not to mention the knock-out punches if you make a wrong move.

poopsintub3• 12 years ago

ok.

madaxe_again• 12 years ago

Wolf, corn, chicken, boat, farmer... usual shenanigans. The usual solution is to drown the wolf, eat the chicken, and get a damned bag for the corn. In this scenario, the correct solution is divorce and a viable criminal justice system that doesn't require prisoners to be kept in boats with families.

Justsignedup• 12 years ago

Best solution ever.

JasonFruit• 12 years ago

I hope the description is better in Japanese: there's a difference between 'stay' and 'be'.

z2• 12 years ago

I'm confused. If it's a Japanese IQ test, why is the swf intro written in traditional Chinese?

EDIT: A less lazy comment--SmallCampus.net that the game links to is a Hong Kong website, which has a collection of puzzles. I still can't find a reference to this being a Japanese job test though.

EDIT2: And, here's the real source. http://www.smallcampus.net/htmlcontent.php?channel=maths_gam... It's a brain teaser for elementary school children.

Xophmeister• 12 years ago

Perhaps simply because the article's author doesn't know or can't tell the difference and just therefore assumed it to be Japanese. There's also a link in the game to smallcampus.net, which appears to be based in Hong Kong.

EDIT: Just saw your edit. Ignore my repetition!

stuartcw• 12 years ago

No. I have had numerous interviews in Japan and never had a kind of test like this. Maybe be one company has used this, but it is far from the norm and as the z2 mentions, the intro is Chinese.

snorkel• 12 years ago

One of the daughters has to bring the boat back, then the father and son cross the river, sell the boat, then they use the proceeds to start a company selling IQ testing services to lazy HR departments. Did I get the job?

biggerfisch• 12 years ago

The only solution I found involved leaving the thief alone several times - is that not worse than leaving the thief with a family whose parents are apparently dangerous?

jonsen• 12 years ago

Pruning the search tree, E.W. Dijkstra:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EW...

boomlinde• 12 years ago

My prolog sense is tingling!

iondream2• 12 years ago

this is unsolvable. the 2 sets of children that can't travel with the adults and the police criminal pair that must be together make too many dependencies. is this a joke?

Udo3• 12 years ago

The criminal people don't need to stay together, the thief can stay behind as long as she is alone. You can hence use the policeman to ferry a son/daughter. The next challenge is if you go from there and ferry one side of the family across, eventually the boat will be on the wrong side - so you need to make a little tedious shuttling/shuffling session to make sure the policeman/thief duo actually waits on the opposite side. From there, it's pretty straight forward again.

I'd say those are the only two critical sections, the rest should follow automatically.

iondream2• 12 years ago

oh I see. it seems obvious now. odd. Thanks

Udo3• 12 years ago

I think there may be several solutions to this, one is:

P+T > P > P+S > P+T > F+S > F > F+M > M > P+T > F > F+M > M > M+D > P+T > P+D > P > P+T

Where P=policeman T=thief S=son F=father M=mother D=daughter.

It helped me to approach this as some kind of machine, or a universe with weird physics - from there you can establish some basic operations which are then easy to combine into the whole solution.

jkldotio• 12 years ago

The link to the flash game didn't work for me so playing it in my head and not succeeding irked me enough to look at the solution video. I wrote it up, a spoiler follows.

When there is a free shore or one person on a shore the cop can serve as an agent of motion as he's only inhibited by the crim, who can be put in that free space. A free cop will let you deal with one of the kids in the problem, the parent can then deal with the remaining kid themselves or the cop can. A mother/father boat shuttle on either side of a cop/crim transport shifts the criminal problem over and allows the cop's magic to be used again, but from the opposite shore.

The cop ferries criminal over to opposite side. He then returns and ferries a boy over and bringing the criminal back. This exploits cop/crim rule by putting the crim alone on a bank and thus "freeing" up the cop's capacity as a coxswain to get the boy over.

Father goes over with next boy. Both boys on the other shore now, but nobody else is there so the father is thus freed up.

They use this freedom to get the boat back by the father returning, and then the mother ferrying him back, and returning with the boat alone.

The cop goes over with the criminal, both stay.

The father returns the boat, goes back with the mother and she comes back alone. This is the same as the previous mother/father move, but it's enabled the cop and crim to come over.

The mother then takes a girl over and stays there with her. Exploiting the fact that there is only one girl left on the original shore and thus she is alone and no rules are violated.

The cop and the criminal come back.

The cop takes the remaining girl over, leaving the criminal alone.

The cop fetches the criminal in a final move.

Like many word problems it is beset with confusions via hidden assumptions. The assumption that children can't be trusted with their parents and a cop is to be trusted with children more than the parents is weird. Unsupervised children are apparently safer than with their parents too. The assumption that the criminal is dangerous to unprotected family members, through theft or violence, but won't run away when left alone clouds the solution as you intuitively don't want to leave the criminal alone even though the rule is stated only in relation to family members.

tokenadult• 12 years ago

Blogspam for something the author plainly didn't investigate thoroughly enough. (It's not really a job application test, it's not at all an "IQ test," and it's not from Japan.) I'm glad other comments here are looking at whether the blog post is even accurate (it is not) and not reflexively responding to headline terms like "IQ test" and "Japan," which often generate knee-jerk responses in online discussion. Hacker News deserves better submissions than this.

Udo3• 12 years ago

I think everybody here already arrived at that conclusion but then they got interested in the actual puzzle.

tzs• 12 years ago

The Father cannot stay with any of the daughters, without their Mother's presence.
The Mother cannot stay with any of the sons, without their Father's presence

This is a bit disturbing.

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