Is it true that the author of Einstein's riddle is Albert Einstein himself?

For many years now, on the Internet, magazines and books, you can find an entertaining logic problem, the author of which is called a great scientist. We checked whether it was indeed Einstein who invented it.

The plot of the riddle is built around five houses in which five representatives of different nationalities live. Each of them prefers a certain drink (in other versions, he grows a certain crop), a certain brand of cigarettes (in the children's version, chocolate) and keeps a certain animal at home. The full picture of these correspondences is not revealed, but based on 15 facts about them, it is proposed to reconstruct two more. At the same time, how claim many sources, Albert Einstein came up with the problem as a child, and he also allegedly believed that only 2% of humanity could solve the problem in their heads.

The fact that it was Albert Einstein who came up with this problem is reported by such resources as "Code", "Reedus", "Favorites", Lada.kz. A very popular puzzle West. She is talked about in the book Jeremy Stangrum "Einstein's entertaining puzzles. Make the little gray cells work."

We will not focus on solving the problem, which is quite elementary and does not require mathematical or other special knowledge - a simple table and the elimination method are enough. Let's try to understand whether this task could have belonged to the creator of the special theory of relativity. The first problem we encounter when talking about the classic version of the puzzle is cigarette brands: Old Gold (1926), Kool (1933), Parliament (1931), Lucky Strike (1917) and Chesterfield (1873). The years of appearance of these brands are indicated in brackets. It is obvious that Einstein, born in 1879, could only see Chesterfield cigarettes as a child. However, this is not yet proof, because the details of the task could change over time.

It should be noted that such tasks are a whole genre that was very popular in the West in the middle of the last century. For example, you can look in a book "101 puzzles for thinking and logic", released in 1957, and encounter dozens of similar tasks. This genre in English-speaking countries is sometimes called “Smith-Jones-Robinson puzzles” in honor of the heroes of one of the first such problems, created in 1930 by the famous English puzzle maker Henry Dudeney. As for the puzzle we are interested in, its first appearance in print dated December 17, 1962. It was published in the international version of the American Life magazine under the title "Who Owns the Zebra?" with an invitation to readers to send their solutions:

Having appeared in such a prestigious publication, the puzzle immediately became popular - it was reprinted in secular magazines (Esquire), and mathematical. Let us note that Albert Einstein was not mentioned either in its title or in the description in the early years. In general, it would be strange to announce a competition to solve an already well-known historical problem. The attribution took place much later (it is difficult to determine in which publication) and was a fairly obvious marketing ploy to arouse interest: “Albert Einstein said that only 2% can decide...”. However, there is no evidence that the scientist loved simple mathematical puzzles. Information about this cannot be found in letters, speeches or articles. There are no other known problems of this kind authored by Einstein.

Thus, there is no evidence that Albert Einstein could have been the author of the famous riddle.

Not true

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