Week 1 Free Think Friday Reflection

       This problem seems like a problem that relies heavily upon the student's ability to work backwards and solve the problem using process of elimination. This problem ultimately asks for one simple answer, which is "who owns the fish as a pet?". Unfortunately, there are many other factors within this problem. In order to figure out who owns the fish, you will need to figure out who lives in which house, what their favorite drink is and even their favorite brand of cigarettes. This problem relies on your ability to figure out all those other components, since it is imperative to figure out just one small piece. The clues do not directly tell you which house each person lives in. In fact, it tells you clues that you may not even realize are clues. For example, one may say "The person who lives in the red house it directly neighbors with the man who enjoys coffee as his favorite drink." For this to be useful and to get the most information out of this clue you need to know a couple of other things. You need to know who enjoys coffee the most. Once you find that, you will know who the man is. However you still do not know what color his house is. Therefore you will need to look to another clue to figure out which house he lives in. Every clue that is needed is on the paper, the hard part is figuring out and depicting the clues. 

     The problem is asking me to find one main component which is, "Who owns the fish as a pet?". Although this is what it is directly asking me, it also demands the knowledge of every other component such as nationality, house color, favorite beverage, favorite cigarette brand and of course the pet they own. You must know the other components to the problem in order to figure out this one little question. This problems is asking use to figure out all of those things for 6 different people. With the five categories and the 6 people, there are over 300 different possible combinations. 

     Well Alex Demos and I decided that a visual representation would be the best thing to do. We came up with the idea of a color coded spreadsheet in order to be the most organized with our thoughts. We started by filling out all of the clues that were basically given to us. During our 20 minutes of class time to work on this difficult problem, we found out about 6 clues for sure. We slowed down a little bit towards the end, but ultimately got a lot of goof work done for the first day attempting this. Now that the chart is color coded, I will try to use deductive reasoning to figure out the rest of the clues.