Bus riddle11/12/2023 ![]() His parents were overjoyed at the news that he would be coming home. When I get home, do you think I could stay with you guys for a while?” “They’ll be sending me home in a few days. It was the same bus they had just been traveling on.Īt the end of the war in Iraq, an American soldier made a phone call to his parents. A bus had been crushed by falling rocks and everybody on board had been killed. There was a news report on the screen that said a terrible accident had just taken place nearby. Inside the diner, the parents and children were happily eating dinner, when they happened to look up at the TV. The bus pulled over to the side of the road and the family got off, one by one. The parents decided to get off the bus at the next shop or restaurant they passed.Īfter a few minutes, they spotted a little roadside diner where they could all grab a bite to eat, so the wife pushed the stop button. When the bus reached the foot of a mountain, the children began complaining that they were hungry. The parents were bringing their children to visit some relatives who lived in a remote rural area. You may have to spend longer trying to figure out what the solution is.Ī family was taking a journey through Colorado on a cross-country bus. The Blue Wizard must be 48, and his children's ages could be 2, 2, 2, and 6, or possibly, 1, 3, 4, and 4.įor more on this riddle, and an even more difficult version, check out MIT lecturer Tanya Khovanova's paper on the problem here.Here are some riddles that are difficult to understand. ![]() This is the only bus number where the age of the Blue Wizard (A) and the number of children (N) cannot be used to determine the children's ages (C), and there is only one possible age of the Blue Wizard (A), so the Red Wizard can finally, at long last, determine his companion's age. We also know that the bus number must be higher than 5, so now it is just a matter of finding the right one. Therefore, the bus number must be lower than 21. ![]() This means that you could simply keep adding children with the age of one to increase the bus number, and the Blue Wizard will always have multiple possible ages. Adding the extra one increases the bus number, but it does not change the wizard's age, the product of his children's ages. By increasing the b us number (B) by one, we can keep the possible wizard ages the same by adding one more child whose age is one. Of course, there are more combinations if the bus number is 5. ![]() In this case, it's possible that the Blue Wizard has 5 children who are each 1 year old, making him 1 year old as well (again, we are suspending disbelief to just look at the numbers). Let's start with the number we are looking for, the bus number (B), and work backward from there. Now we need to start crunching some numbers. In addition, we know that there must be multiple possibilities for N and C that would give us the same number for A. To summarize, we know that A, N, and B cannot be used to determine C. This means that there must be multiple possible combinations of the Blue Wizard's number of children (N) and those children's ages (C) that multiply to equal the age of the Blue Wizard (A). So there must be three children or more.īecause the Blue Wizard said "No, you could not," we know that the age of the Blue Wizard (A), the number of children (N), and the bus number (B) cannot be used by the Red Wizard to determine the children's ages (C). Knowing the Blue Wizard's age (the product of the children's ages), the number of children, and the bus number (the sum of the children's ages), the Red Wizard could work out the individual ages of the children every time if there were only two. ![]() If the number of children is one, then the Red Wizard could work out that child's age. ![]()
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