Help with a particular type of hint...orange and red can only be paired with A or X?

[pat44]

These come up all the time for me and I am just stumped. I've gone over the tutorials over and over.
Which TYPE of logic issue is this?

For example, in my puzzle the clue is "Of the OIL CREW team and the team that finished third, one uses orange paintballs and the other uses red paintballs"
The hint says "If Oil Crew does not equal first, and orange and red can only be paired with either Oil Crew or third, then orange cannot be equal to first. Mark the highlighted cell as FALSE."

Is this a Transitive Relationship?

Truly in awe of how quickly people are able to solve these logic puzzles. I am getting better. But almost always get stumped on this type. THANKS in advance!

[JoshGrams]

Yeah, that's the last slide on the Transitive Relationship set: that's a complicated one.

This is probably easier to see if we look at just one half of that clue: "orange paintballs must be the Oil Crew or the team that finished third."

So if orange is NOT third, it must be Oil Crew, and thus it must be in one of the other placements that's compatible with Oil Crew.

In your case, you have Oil Crew marked as NOT first. So if orange were in first place, then it's not in third place, AND it can't be Oil Crew (because Oil Crew can't be in first place).

Then you can treat the other half of the clue the same way (red can't be in first place because then it wouldn't be third AND it would give a contradiction if it were Oil Crew).

Does that help?

Once you understand the logic, to see them I'm looking at the row and column of the Oil Crew/third pairing: Xs there may be able to be transfered to the other side of the either-or.

[pat44]

I will continue to study this. I’m glad to hear it isn’t easy!

[JoshGrams]

Hmm. Consider this grid, maybe? Assume you have the Xs in the top left (names/ages) section, and a clue that says "The 12.0 foot long crocodile is either Darwin or the 20-year-old."

I've marked the 12-foot crocodile as being Drake but you can see that that's invalid because then it's not Darwin, but the X at Drake/20 blocks it from being 20 years old.

Similarly, the 12-foot crocodile couldn't be five years old (not 20, but Darwin is blocked by the other X).

transitive-exclusion.png

[pat44]

Thanks!
For the type that is my original question, I can now see the pattern and solve for it, but honestly it feels like cheating because I don’t feel it in my bones.

Your example, “The 12.0 foot long crocodile is either Darwin or the 20-year-old" is slightly different isn’t it? Or is it the same and I just don’t feel it yet?

[JoshGrams]

It's the same principle, but the clue type in your original question is two of my example put together. I was trying to simplify it to make it easier to see.

You had "Of the OIL CREW team and the team that finished third, one uses orange paintballs and the other uses red paintballs."

So (for the purposes of the transitive relationship) you could break that down into two parts: "The orange paintballs were used by either the Oil Crew or the team that finished third." and "The red paintballs were used by either the Oil Crew or the team that finished third." So you can take the transitive Xs from the either/or and put them on both the orange and the red paintballs.

And if you have a puzzle with four categories, all four of the items could be in different categories, like "Of the Oil Crew team and the team that finished third, one uses orange paintballs and the other was formed in 2010." and then you have TWO different either/or relationships to look at, and two places to put Xs for each of those. Those ones still slow me way down (although I'm usually only about "average" speed to begin with).

[pat44]

Thanks so much! I’m getting there!
Still slow - which may be partly due to being on a small phone - but making sense of the transitives.

I appreciate you taking the time to help.

[SirOmnias]

If you google "Puzzle Baron How to solve a logic puzzle" and then go to the topic on the right called "Transitive Relationships (Unaligned Pair)" and go through all 7 of those slowly and really try understand them, it should help a lot with the "Of" type clues.

[ella]

https://logic.puzzlebaron.com/how-to...gic-puzzle.php -- seriously, bookmark this -- because it's useful when you find yourself repeatedly stuck on any one type of puzzle, and here's the unaligned pairs link: https://logic.puzzlebaron.com/how-to...unaligned-pair

[SirOmnias]

I'm slowly working on a intermediate video with tips/ideas for getting faster solves.

However, I think I might first do a video just talking about solving puzzles in general using the site ella and I mentioned and going through it. I figured that when I started I didn't really find much help and I'm sure it would make more of the new users stick around.

[pat44]

I read those pages and think I understand…but then transferring my understanding to a new puzzle exposes just how much I didn’t REALLY understand!!