t05rrs%mpx1@LANL.GOV (Dick Silbar) (09/19/87)
About two weeks ago someone posed the problem of the vacuum cleaner salesman and the housewife; he was supposed to guess the ages of the three kids knowing the sum of ages was 13 and the product equal to the house number. Nice problem. However, Rajan Gupta points out to me that any vacuum cleaner salesman worth his salt would have had enough visual and audible clues from the kids screaming in the back- ground to have given the answer right off. People on the AIList are, I gather, not supposed to use plausible reasoning?