Nouns

Introduction

This article explains what the Nouns are in a logic puzzle. Nouns are the objects in the puzzle and are usually easy to find. For the logic puzzle "Five Houses", here are the nouns for this puzzle, where the Noun Types are: House, Color, Nationality, Hobby, Pet, and Drink. Note that the names of the noun types are singular, not plural. For this puzzle there are five nouns for each type. For every logic puzzle, you must have the same number of nouns for each noun type. You cannot edit the data on this form.

The nouns are used to define the Links in a logic puzzle, in building the Facts, and in programming the Rules. While the logic puzzle is being solved, the Marks tell us if two nouns are or are not with each other. The Chart displays the pairings between any two nouns. The only thing not affected by the nouns are the Verbs.

Links

Here are the links for our example logic puzzle. The links are named "with", "directly to the right of", and "next to", and all of the links use the noun type House. Usually, the order of the nouns within a noun type is not important, but there is one major exception:

If a noun type is used to define a link, then the nouns for that type must be in a logical order.

Placeholders

While most logic puzzles will give you all of the nouns in the puzzle, some very difficult puzzles may not give you all of the values of the nouns. This means the values must be calculated by one or more rules. Nouns where the initial value is unknown are called Placeholders.

Usually these values are numeric, such as the number of people who attended a talk in "Astrophysics Conference", or the age of a salesperson in "Dandy Salespeople".