Mind Games
Prologue
Okay, I get it. A lot of us are bored. We’re on lockdown and are looking for things to do, to occupy our minds. Brainteasers are a great way to pass the time as well as keep your mind active. But where to find them? Enter the puzzle memes. There are hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Three have come to my attention that I find particularly annoying. Why? Because ultimately they are futile. I’m going to explain why.
But
let me warn you: there are spoilers involved. I intend to expose these fraudulent
riddles and puzzles for what they are. But not like this asshole, who just wants
to spoil everyone’s fun.
These
guys are a little bit better, because they seem like they really want to know the
real story.
Unfortunately,
I think this pair is more like Adam.
In
the end though, they are all trying to educate us. And that’s what
I am trying to do here. I hope. At the very least, I’m trying to save you from wasting
your precious time on stuff like this when you could be wasting it on something
else.
Part One: The Abridged Version of Noah’s Ark
The
one that inspired this rant:
Actually,
this happens more than you might think…
Well, at least this crew
is cleaning up their mess.
It’s not always road
crews though.
Anyway,
this riddle is a modern version of an old riddle dating back to at least 1730, “As
I was going to St. Ives” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_I_was_going_to_St_Ives).
Its roots might be even older. A similar problem is found in the ancient Egyptian
Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (Problem 79), dated to around 1650 BC.
Almost no one looks happy in this picture.
But there is that one gal…
The
“correct” answer is 1; everyone else is leaving St. Ives. My problem with this has
always been with the word “met”. It does not necessarily exclude the possibility
that two roads converged on the way to St. Ives. If everyone is going
there, the correct answer would be 2,802.
Back
to our riddle, the real answer is hinted at in the title, but we’ll get to that
in a minute. We are supposed to figure out how many animals are going to the river.
Let’s work out how the riddle master wants us to do it first.
We
have 1 rabbit, 6 elephants, 2 monkeys, and 1 parro[t] mentioned. 1 rabbit saw 6
elephants. Since each elephant saw 2 monkeys there must be 12 monkeys, and since
each monkey holds 1 parro[t] in each hand there must be 24 parro[t]s.
But
is that the only or best way to interpret the riddle? Unfortunately for us, it is
not. The best way to analyze what’s going on is to break it down into its component
parts, i.e. the three statements we are given.
The Rabbit and the Elephants
“1
rabbit saw 6 elephants while going to the river.”
Now, we know nothing about either the 1 rabbit or the 6 elephants except they saw somebody going to the river. We don’t know that the rabbit or the elephants were going anywhere. The first line of the question may correctly be interpreted in two ways:
1. The
rabbit, while going to the river, saw six elephants.
2. The
rabbit saw six elephants while [they were] going to the river.
In
the first case, the rabbit is going to the river and on its way saw six elephants
who may or may not have been going to the river. In the second case, the rabbit
who may or may not have been going to the river saw six elephants who were on their
way to the river. So then there are three possible answers in just the first section:
1. Only
the rabbit is going to the river (one animal)
2. Only
the elephants are going to the river (six animals)
3. Both
the rabbit and the elephants are going to the river (seven animals)
The Elephants and the Monkeys
“Every
elephant saw 2 monkeys going towards th[e] river.”
Did
each elephant see the same 2 monkeys, or were there 12 monkeys and each elephant
only saw a different pair of them? Or in the worst-case scenario, there was an overlap
in the monkeys as they were seen by the elephants, e.g. elephant #1 saw monkeys
1 & 2, elephant #2 saw monkeys 2 & 3, elephant #3 saw monkeys 3 & 4,
and so on. And since the overlaps would not necessarily be sequential like that
multiple elephants might focus on the same monkey for their first and different
ones for the second. It’s a mess.
And
we don’t know if these were the only monkeys. There might be some there that the
elephants didn’t see. Which also means there may have been elephants that the rabbit
didn’t see, but that’s unlikely because it’s hard to hide an elephant. I know. I’ve
tried. In a room.
So,
the upshot is there could be anywhere from 2 to 12 monkeys, if we
stick with the number we’ve been given.
The Monkeys and the Parro[t]s
“Every
monkey holds 1 parro[t] in their hands.”
It
doesn’t actually say the monkeys are holding a parro[t] in each hand; it says they
are holding the parro[t]s in their hands. What if the monkeys are just using 2 hands
to hold 1 parro[t] each? Then we are left with only 1 parro[t]s per monkey as opposed
to 2. In total numbers then, we could have from 2 to 24 parro[t]s on their way to
the river.
“Alright
Pete, why do you insist on writing ‘parro[t]’ instead of ‘parrot’; it’s annoying”.
The meme is cut off, obviously, but I wonder if that was intentional. Parro is actually
a word. Sort of. It’s a slang term. But according to the Urban Dictionary there
is a bit of controversy about the etymology.
“Parro”
from the Urban Dictionary
1. Actually,
the word parro has nothing to do with being drunk. It's Jamaican and is derived
from the word paranoid from smoking weed. It is in no way related to being intoxicated.
2. Australian
slang term for being drunk.
3. Some
one who is paroletic from being intoxicated (common Austrailian term for when some
one is very drunk).
4. It’s
a derivitave of the term "parylitic" which means paralysed in the muscles.
Looking
at the difficulty the contributors are having with spelling, I don’t know how reliable
any of the information is. I just thought it would add an interesting wrinkle if
the monkeys were holding a bunch of stoners. It’s a stretch, I know. I’ll write
“parrot” (and “the” instead of “th[e]”) from now on.
"It's Just Words, Folks, Just Words" – Donald Trump
There
are some linguistic tricks being played which allow for additional
interpretations to be inserted (valid or not), and pure mathematics cannot
abide that. Aside from the ambiguities I have already pointed out, such as
whether it was the rabbit, elephants, or both going to the river, or how many monkeys
and parrots there really were, the word “every” is used twice, once for the
elephants and once for the monkeys. We have assumed that we are only to
consider the animals in the puzzle, but nothing really limits us to that. If every
elephant saw 2 monkeys, and every monkey holds 1 parrot, we could not possibly
know the answer. How many elephants and monkeys are there? Are we referring to
all of them everywhere, or to the breeds specific to area where the riddle
takes place, wherever that might be?
There
is also a sudden shift of tenses, but this could be due to bad form on the part
of the writer. But since it is there, it’s fair game. The rabbit and the
elephants both saw sometime in the past. But every monkey holds
a parrot right now. If we are talking about two different times, this is either
the slowest hike ever, or the riddle falls apart because its parts are not
connected.
The End
“How
many Animals are going towards the river?”
Lastly—and
there are probably more facets I could examine, but I’m getting tired of
this—we come to the Question of the riddle, arguably it’s most
important part. Language is the most nebulous of all our tools. The language
throughout the riddle would seem to indicate that the author is
not from around these here parts. He/she says “towards” instead of “toward”,
for instance, which identifies them as someone from the United Kingdom or
Australia, as opposed to Canada or the United States, as least according to
Grammarly.
Another
fine point is the difference between “to” used in the first part and “towards”
later on. The word “to” generally refers to the destination of a
journey, whereas “towards” carries with it the notion of movement.
If the author is in fact making a distinction here, we cannot count the rabbit
or the elephants because even though they are going to end up at the river at
some point, they may have stopped off at a Starbucks and are not making any
progress towards the river at the moment.
Now
keeping in mind the possible origin of the author, I call your attention to the
word “animal”. Merriam-Webster says that definition 2b is “mammal”. After
checking the usage of “animal” as “mammal” (hardly an exhaustive search, but
there were few easily obtainable examples), every instance I found could be
traced to either the United Kingdom or Australia. This would appear to imply
that the author could possibly meant “How many Mammals are going
towards the river?” in which case we cannot count the parrots at all.
Based
on all of the above, we can distill a few numbers for each section of the
riddle (if we ignore the “every” possibility).
1 rabbit may have been going to the river
6 elephants may have been going to the river
0-7 animals total
2. The elephants and the monkeys section
2-12 monkeys may have been going to the river
2, 4, 12, or 24 parrots may have been going to the
river
Ultimately,
then there can be no definitive answer to this riddle. It has been sabotaged
beyond repair by the language it uses, which the author well knew because the
title betrays this:
“The
Battle of English and Mathematics”
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