I ran across this meme-y joke recently…
And it immediately reminded me of an old “exam” I saw years ago:
The Venn comic is silly but works on multiple levels. Reminds me of the other quip:
There are two types of people: Those that sort people into groups and those that don’t.
It’s wonderfully cyclical and self-referential. A variant that I’m fond of (for computer programming reasons) goes as follows:
There are 10 types of people in the world: Those that understand binary and those that don’t.
Get it? It’s ok if you don’t.
Though the Venn diagram above is a joke about Venn diagrams, it exists (pardon the pun) within a subset of other types of logic puzzles.
I’ve recently fallen in love with a logic-based game known as “logic puzzle grids”, which themselves are a type of constraint satisfaction problems. A puzzle book I recently bought at an airport is filled with these. My treasured copy is very worn now:
Here is a wonderful howto for solving these. The method includes making a matrix-like grid for all the possible options for connections between a set of mutually exclusive properties (e.g. “Rob has a circuit hobby and drinks white russians; Sarah has a book hobby and drinks coffee”):
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