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Imaginary ladder?

B

BruceCM

Well-Known Member
There was a man who fell down a deep hole & needed a ladder to get out. So, he hopped out, got a ladder, dropped back down the hole & used the ladder to climb out. Spot the problem with that!
 
142857 said:
Yes. Where did he get the ladder from?
Click to expand...
How about 'how did he get out to get the ladder, if he needed that to get out? If he was able to get out without the ladder, why bother getting it? Or are you taking the miachael?
 
Sorry Bruce. Not taking the michael. I thought the answer was too obvious and I wasn't sure what the point was.

Also I wanted to give others a chance to answer the question.

Here is a slightly harder one:

You enter a room and there are 2 doors. One is the door to heaven and the other is the door to hell.

There is a guard on each door. One of the guards always tells the truth and the other always lies.

If you can only ask one guard one one question, and from the answer deduce which is the door to heaven, what should that question be?
 
Thought everybody knew that one by now! Ask either, "if I asked your friend which door they're guarding, what'd they say". Then reverse the answer. Next?
 
Okay, here is another one.

There is a room with 3 light bulbs, but only one is working. Outside the room there are 3 light switches, one for each light bulb.

You may only enter the room once. How do you determine which light bulb is working?
 
OK. Well, the ladder one was supposed to be more like an analogy, anyway. Anybody should be able to spot the problem in that eg. Now, is it remotely possible to apply our problem solving skills to some real life ones? As I've covered elsewhere but can't get much response to them.
 
Okay, with the light bulbs you can only turn one light bulb on at a time. And you need to be able to say which light bulb is working when you enter the room - you can't go back out and change the switch. But good answer to the question as I put it.

As for your question about the answers to real life problems, I think the problem is that you have a very "binary" way of thinking. Everything has to be one thing or the other. All answers and advice have to be precise and should give a simply rule that can be applied to the problem at hand which will solve that problem.

There is nothing wrong with having a mind that thinks that way. That is a common aspie trait that you just seem to have in abundance. It must be very frustrating to live in a world where everybody (even most adult aspies) seems to apply a kind of "fuzzy logic" to everything, when that "fuzzy logic" makes no sense to you at all.
 
Any suggestions that deal with reality as I know it will do. So far, none do so. I wasn't disputing what other people, whom I've not met might or might not mean by what they say, only the people I know. There's no basis for me to think anybody here, or in any forum, knows what those people mean (since they've never met any of them). If I have to think I've misunderstood them as badly as required for the suggestions to work, I've no basis to believe the advisors understand what people they know mean, let alone people they don't know. How you do or don't apply 'fuzzy logic' isn't the question, it's how I'd do it & I said nothing about any kind of logic! It's simple enough for most people to have a go at me about the stuff in the first place & then I'm done for asking about it, not them. As soon as anybody wants to try their own rules, offline, it might be possible to start. Limited energy for pointless mind games, maybe others have more.
 
Back to the imaginary ladder then...

A man wakes up in a room, he hears a muffled voice;
"We are putting the lid on your coffin now, each wall, the floor and the roof are all 6 feet thick of concrete, you are 50 miles from any civilisation but we are not truly heartless... we have put in there with you, your favourite coffee table!"

Around 2 hours later that same man is seen walking through town with stiff legs and a bandage round his head, he is sucking on a cough drop and is covered in animal hair. When asked how he got out he replies...
 
"I banged on the table until I was sore, used the saw to cut the table in half, put the two halves together to make a hole & got out through it. Then, I shouted myself hoarse & thus trotted to town." Ha, ha.
 
That whole thing is weird because I reckon we usually don't think that way, when my brother told me this problem and I just couldn't get it, he thought I was having him on and when he explained the answer to me and I told him it was impossible so the answer was wrong, he got quite irate, I like the imaginary ladder but while I recognize it as something quirky and fun, at its base I find it really annoying that it seems to make sense while impossible.

I probably prefer genuine brain teasers that could actually happen in real life and then if I cant work it out I don't feel as bad, just stoopid LOL

Like this one thats as old as the hills:
Upon returning home Dave discovers two corpses on the carpet in the lounge, it is Larry and Sara, his flatmate's and they are lying in a pool of water, apart from the water and the cat sitting in the corner, the room is pretty much empty and the door was firmly locked. Dave had only been down to the shops and wasn't away for more than ten minutes. 'How did they die' wonders Dave
 
Not come across it & can't be bothered trying to work it out, as it isn't actually a real life problem. If it was, it'd be up to the police, etc. I was asking in reference to my real life problems, not coming up with brainteasers, whether 'realistic' or not.
 
Ah, I see I have misunderstood the objective BruceCM
Upon seeing your first post I presumed that it was a metaphor for misunderstanding and I then tried to apply that same analogy to my own lack of understanding of certain things that a supposed logical mind assumes is 'obvious'.

In case you were wondering, my next post was about Larry and Sara who were two goldfish and the cat had knocked over their bowl, killing them (certainly not a matter for the Police Ha-Ha)
To which I was going to add that it would have been impossible for me to make that assumption based only on the extra information of the water and the cat sitting in the corner. Anybody else would have not seen an obvious answer and leapt to the next possible conclusion which is that the cat did it.
 
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If it was in relation to a real life misunderstanding with which I could help you (which would be rather unlikely), I'd try to. No offence but I'm just not that interested in discussing made up puzzles.
 
Flip one switch, leave it on for twenty minutes, come back to turn it off and flip on another switch instead. Now you can enter the room.

I don't get the ladder metaphor, unless it is about imagining the hole as well.
 
Maybe he didn't fall to the bottom of the hole, but was caught on a ledge. He then decided it would be so much fun to explore the hole, that he hopped out from the ledge, got a ladder, and went to the bottom of the hole.
 
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