Riddle challenge

[LV]

With 5 attributes, each having 5! permutations, that's (5!)^5 = 24^5 = 7962624 possible combinations—about 8 million. Yes, the problem can be solved in a few steps with human intelligence and a bit of patience. Thank you, Joanna. I’m now taking the subway to work while solving riddles on my smartphone. 

[Joanna from IRC]

Good news I solved it. 

What I did was made some rectangles of paper with the clues written on them then I taped the matching clues together and arranged the papers in order and continued taping the ones I was sure about together.

There was some confusion whether the ivory and green houses should be 3&4 or 4&5 but then I noticed that the red house for Englishman had to be the 3rd house because there was no other place for it.

After that I continued using clues and process of elimination to complete the rest of it. That was pretty fun 

[dbannon]

Gee, thought someone here would try for a FPC version ?

Here is mine, slow, difficult to read, fun to write.

Thanks Joanna

Davo

[Thaddy]

Let me give it a try with my fiveway logic and sets. Report later if it makes sense. My gut feeling is that sets removes at least the permutations squared part.

[Joanna from IRC]

Gee, thought someone here would try for a FPC version ?
Here is mine, slow, difficult to read, fun to write.
Thanks Joanna
Davo

I wasn’t really planning to make code but regardless I think it’s a good idea to solve it manually to really understand it. The first 3 houses were the easiest to start with and the ivory and green house being adjacent .

The Englishman living in red house eliminated all other houses with known colors or nationalities. So it could only go in center.  After that the puzzle was much easier than I had expected. The order in which the clues can be used is not immediately obvious. When I first tried to solve it I was not using the clues properly and I thought that I would have to try many different layouts. The pieces of paper made it a lot easier to see what was happening. I had to cycle through the clues to find the one that wasn’t ambiguous. So maybe the clue records would need a counter to check for multiple possibilities and skip it.

I think if I was going to try to code this I might use an array[1..5] of records for results.
The relationship between records in different columns is sort of tricky I guess logic would need to be added somehow .

In some cases like pet fox it only said next to but not which side. I’d have to think about that