Discussion Main / StockLateralThinkingPuzzle

I'm removing all the analysis appended to the St. Ives Puzzle under the examples about why the riddle can be interpreted differently:

• Of course, if you interpret the last sentence to mean, Out of the kits, cats, sacks and wives, how many were going to St Ives, the answer is zero.
• And technically, you can't say for sure how many are going away from St. Ives either. Due to imprecise grammar, it's unclear if you meet the wives etc on the road, or just the man.
• Don't forget that, just because the speaker met the man (and possibly wives, sacks, cats, kits, and mitts as well) on his (the speaker's) way to St. Ives, this doesn't necessarily mean that everyone except the speaker was travelling away from St. Ives; it's perfectly possible to meet someone who's travelling in the same direction as you are if you're travelling at different speeds.
  • The puzzle depends on a pedantic (and possibly slightly archaic, outside of railroad jargon) distinction between "met" and "passed" when referring to encountering another party on a road
• Finally, it's a bit of a stretch to consider sacks and mitts as part of a group of travelers, which would change the total anyway.

I don't think these really add anything. Why should this page have a detailed analysis of every possible flaw of the stock puzzle?

Edited by VVK

The vast majority of these puzzles seem to be trick question involving words. That is, their intention is to deceive the inattentive listener with an unexpected or unnoticeable wording. They are not so much puzzles of logic or even "thinking outside the box", as they are tests to see if you can catch which word is the unexpected one.

Is that really what "lateral thinking puzzle" is? Wordplay? I would have thought of it as being something smarter. Something that makes you go "ah, clever, I didn't think of it like that" rather than "that's dumb, you just tricked me with unclear wording."

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Which of these two weighs more? A pound of gold or a pound of feathers?

• Actually, the answer "they both weigh the same" is wrong. Precious metals are weighed in the troy system (troy ounce=31.1 g, troy pound=12 troy ounce=373 g), just about everything else in the avoirdupois system (avoirdupois ounce=28.4 g, avoirdupois pound=16 avoirdupois ounce=454 g). So an ounce of gold weighs more than an ounce feathers, but a pound of gold weighs less than a pound of feathers.

[Okay, it's already mentioned in the page.]

Edited by MikeRosoft