Only 2 Percent of People Can Solve Einstein’s Riddle—Can You?

There’s nothing like a good riddle to stimulate your mind and give you an excuse to channel your inner Sherlock Holmes. Sure, the thrill of solving puzzles may not give you the adrenaline rush of a skydive, but regularly doing logic and crossword puzzles can keep your brain young as you age. And they’re just a lot of fun. Here are 16 physics jokes every science lover will appreciate.

Now, you can take your problem-solving skills to the next level with a riddle that Albert Einstein invented himself. The story goes that Einstein wrote this complicated logic puzzle when he was a young man, and he estimated that only two percent of the people who tried to solve it would successfully do so.

While there isn’t any solid evidence to confirm that Einstein created it—and somehow prophesied the exact number of people to get it right—it’s still a mind-bending puzzle. Doing some of these weird brain puzzles can make you smarter, too.

Here’s the setup: There are five houses, each painted a different color. In each house lives a person with a different nationality. These five owners drink a certain type of beverage, smoke a certain brand of cigar, and keep a certain pet. No owners have the same pet, smoke the same cigar, or drink the same beverage.

The question is, who owns the fish?

Here are the clues:

• The Brit lives in the red house
• The Swede keeps dogs as pets
• The Dane drinks tea
• The green house is on the left of the white house
• The green house’s owner drinks coffee
• The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds
• The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill
• The man living in the center house drinks milk
• The Norwegian lives in the first house
• The man who smokes blends lives next to the one who keeps cats
• The man who keeps horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill
• The owner who smokes BlueMaster drinks beer
• The German smokes Prince
• The Norwegian lives next to the blue house
• The man who smokes blend has a neighbor who drinks water

Take some time and think it over. Draw out each house. Make a chart for each category, if you want to get really detailed. (Trust us, you do.) Stumped? Try solving these riddles for kids. Not all of us can be Einstein.

Do you know who owns the fish? Watch the video below to see if you’re right.

What, you think we’d just give away the answer? Why would we give you the opportunity to cheat on one of the world’s hardest logic puzzles? If you want 25 difficult riddles with answers, check here.