Three Great Riddles
R iddles are treasures. In the same way that everyone should know how to tell at least one good joke, everyone should also know how to tell at least one good riddle. As diversions go, riddles have many great qualities: they cause people to exercise logical thinking and typically encourage people to broaden their perspectives. In social circumstances, riddles can also bring about a satisfying feeling of either competition or collaboration. Most importantly, there are very few experiences which compare to that moment when all the pieces of a riddle ‘click’ and the person solving the riddle gets that ‘aha!’ moment.
In the spirit of solving and sharing riddles, the following article will present my three favorite riddles of all time. Though I will provide hints for these riddles, I will hide the answers so that they can only be found through thorough inspection. Enjoy!
(Also, honorable mention to Mr.Gibson, my 8th grade science teacher who first inspired my love of riddles! He would start off each class with a different riddle. I’ve held on to each riddle to this day.)
Gates of Heaven & Hell
You’ve just died. Your soul is in a room with two doors. There’s no way to see what is beyond each of the doors but thanks to divine intervention you know that opening one door will lead you into heaven while opening the other door will suck you straight into hell for all of eternity. Rather high stakes eh? The doors are indistinguishable from each other in every way. Your only chance of finding the door to salvation depends on two men who happen to be in the same room. Even though these men look identical, you know through divine intervention that one man is actually a devil who always answers questions with a lie, while the other is actually an angel who always answers questions with the truth. Both these men know which door leads to heaven and which door leads to hell. You can only ask one of the men to answer exactly one question for you, after which you must choose one of the two doors. What question do you ask to ensure that you always go to heaven?
Even though this riddle is already rather well known, it’s still one of my favorite riddles of all time. It has a wildly clever solution, and even though this riddle is famous, people will still often forget the solution. As someone who knows the answer, I often wonder how someone first came up with it. What method did they use to find the answer? It’s also great because it easily captures the imagination: the setup proposes the highest stakes possible in a somewhat surreal scenario. The riddle is difficult enough that people seldom get the answer on their own, but luckily, just understanding the simplicity of the answer is often satisfying enough for most people.
Errands & Eggs
A young country girl left her home to do her daily errands while carrying a basket full of eggs. Her chickens laid too many so she thought that she would offer the extra ones to her neighbor. As she skipped along her way, she ran into a peculiar gentleman who asked her for a number of eggs equal to half the eggs in her basket plus half of another egg from the remaining half. Happily, the young lady obliged the stranger and continued on her way. A bit later she ran into an entirely different stranger who, curiously, requested a number of eggs equal to half the eggs currently in her basket, plus half of another egg from the remaining half. Once again she was happy to oblige the new stranger and continue on her way. Finally, she ran into a third gentleman, who asked the young lady for a number of eggs equal to half the eggs currently in her basket plus half of another egg from the remaining half. She obliged this last stranger, but later realized that she had no more eggs. How many eggs did she have when she first left the house?
The hint for this riddle is that the young lady only ever gives away whole eggs. There's nothing peculiar about the eggs in this riddle: they're regular eggs fresh from the chicken. This riddle is a great example of working backwards in order to arrive at a solution. If you're telling this riddle, be sure that you don't allow people to just guess numbers at random without having them explain why their answer is true: otherwise listeners will be free to guess numbers at random and spoil the fun of actually solving the riddle.
Golden Bowling Balls
There’s a king from an exotic land who is obsessed with three things: gold, the number ten, and bowling. On his hundredth birthday — that’s ten times ten mind you — he orders ten bowling ball companies to make him ten bowling balls each. Each bowling ball is made from ten pounds of solid gold. The king also instructed these companies to place their logos on the bowling balls, so that he could distinguish which company made which bowling ball by seeing the logo. Eventually, he receives all one hundred bowling balls from all ten companies. He’s quite pleased, until he gets an anonymous tip that one of the companies skimped out on one pound of gold for each of their ten bowling balls. This means that one of the companies made a set of ten bowling balls with each bowling ball weighing only nine pounds. Sadly because the difference between nine pounds and ten pounds is below the JND — the Just Noticeable Difference — the king needs to use implements to determine which bowling balls weigh less: comparing the weight of different bowling balls in your hands is not enough. As circumstance would have it only one tool is available to the king: a single platform, the likes of which, if the king were to place any weight on it, the platform would display the weight of that thing. Though the platform scale could accurately measure the weight of thirty elephants, because of its age, it is only capable of giving one accurate measurement before it is irrevocably broken. How can you weigh some arrangement of the bowling balls such that, after a single weighing, the king would be able to determine which company gave less gold than they were commissioned to?
The solution to this riddle is interesting enough to be worth the long setup. It has a quirky, imaginative story and coming up with the answer is entirely satisfying.
Those are my three favorite riddles of all time: Happy Riddling!
