What proportion of the human population could answer the example from that paper?

    Question: Strangers A, B, C, D, and E line up from youngest on the left to oldest on the right. Their clothing
    colors and shoe colors all differ, and they come from five different regions.
    Known facts:
    1. A is from Morocco.
    2. D is five years older than B.
    3. E is older than A.
    4. C stands next to D.
    5. A stands next to B.
    6. The person in teal shoes is not adjacent to the person from Vanuatu.
    7. One twelve-year-old wears yellow shoes.
    8. The person in orange shoes wears white clothing.
    9. The person in blue clothing is from Chile.
    10. The youngest person wears red shoes.
    11. Counting from the right, the fourth person comes from South Africa.
    12. E wears yellow clothing.
    13. The person in green shoes does not wear multicolored clothing.
    14. Two people are twelve years old, ordered by birth month.
    15. One adult is thirty-five years old, and that age is sixteen less than the combined ages of the other four.
    If you multiply every possible age C might have, what number do you obtain?

What does "The person in green shoes does not wear multicolored clothing" even mean?

Nowhere is "multicoloured" defined, are we to assume it should be treated as a colour and implied that someone else must be wearing "multicoloured clothing"? Because strictly that doesn't logically follow, and it ought to be phrased as "The person in green shoes is not the person wearing multicoloured clothing" if that is the case.

This is an extremely hard logic puzzle, especially since it's revealed at the end that there are multiple solutions.

I'd expect anyone to struggle unless armed with prolog.

▲ defrost 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> What does [ 13 ] even mean?

It means that it is possible for someone to be wearing a white shirt and yellow pants (say), but the person in green shoes came from the set of a Wes Anderson film.

▲

xnorswap 4 hours ago | parent [-]

That's cute, but it's driving me crazy, I guess I'll have to sit down and solve it to figure out how it's meant to be clued, assuming it's not just a red-herring entirely.

	▲	xnorswap 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Right, this is based on pen-and-paper working, so I could be wrong, but I think it's a red-herring, the set of "clothing" seems to be: white, blue, yellow, and is otherwise undefined. But we know from [1], [2], [4], [5] and [11], that the order must be: A, B, C, D, E or A, B, E, D, C. Which makes C either the older 12 year old or the 35 year old. The key this is that D can't be a 12 year old without A being in slot 2, but A can't be in slot 2 because slot 2 is South Africa and A is Morocco. Trying to reach the shoes + Vanuatu clue is a complete waste of time, paying any attention to shoes or clothing is a waste of time, it feels like there ought to be a way to narrow it down to one of those two configurations, but the clothing is too ambiguous, the shoes end up irrelevant. What a frustrating puzzle, where half the clues are seemingly redundant.