Haven’t read or watched the solution yet, but I would flip over the 8 to see if it’s blue and then the green card to see if the number is NOT even. The premise is saying all even numbers yield blue on the other side. It doesn’t say if blue cards could or could not have an odd number on the other side.
Flipping the 5 over could give a blue or green, but that’s irrelevant because the premise doesn’t say what color odd numbers would be and it has no bearing on the truth of the evens-are-blue relationship.
Flipping the blue doesn’t give as much information as the flipping the green would—if the green shows odd then we know for sure the premise is incorrect. If it shows even then the statement is more truthful.
Just a fair warning if you want to enter this: the people who come up with these puzzles are usually dickish, so the intuitive solution is always the stupid/very wrong one.
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You said “dickish”? People who are really good at this tend to be freaks and perverts, often delighting in misanthropic arrogance. Who cares what the shortest path is? It has no bearing on our normal human existence. It’s fine for computer logic, but that’s why we have computers in the first place: to help people, not make them feel stupid.
It applies to my work since I’m dealing with software logic, but it was part of a broader study in cognitive reasoning/psychology that some people care about.
Really though, the worst kind of people are the ones that say “it was the easiest thing in the world! I can’t believe anyone got that wrong.” It’s easy to get stuff like the wrong because not a lot of people would put so much effort into something trivial. There’s only so much mental energy in the day.
There are four cards. Four. Logic is not necessarily efficiency, but even efficiency doesn’t apply here. Just turn over all the damn cards–it will take about 5 seconds–because curiosity trumps logic any day.
Haha! I like your directness.
This is a simplified, frivolous example, but I can attest stuff like this does have real world applications. Working yet inefficient programming logic can cost a lot in bandwidth. There’s probably industrial/production situations where this comes into play, too…don’t know enough about that though.
Well, sure, there might be real life applications to finding the most efficient route, but it wasn’t presented that way! 😛
Yeah, the video just showed the puzzle, not really all the stuff behind it.
I think that might be a pun.
Also, I owe you a manuscript. I’m bad. It’s actually done…reading it over the next few days.