The Water Collection Dilemma

Title: The Water Collection Dilemma

General Information about Item:

  • Verbal folklore (riddle)
  • Language: English
  • Country of Origin: United States
  • Informant: Shailin Shah
  • Date Collected: 5-23-19

Informant Data:

  • Shailin Shah is a rising junior at Colby College studying Physics and Computer Science. He will be attending Dartmouth for the next three semesters (starting this summer) as part of an Engineering Dual-Degree program. He entered Colby as a prospective Computer Science major but ended up falling in love with the Physics department and built a passion for lab-based research. During his free time, he serves as a math tutor for undergraduates and plays tennis casually with friends. In high school, he participated in Science Olympiad competitions, where he initially grew an intrigue for the physical sciences and its community of thinkers.

Contextual Data:

  • Cultural Context: This riddle was made particularly famous by the movie Die Hard: With a Vengeance as a requirement for saving society from imminent destruction. It is more commonly used to test the listener’s ingenuity, making it ideal for scenarios where intelligence is being finely tested. Whether it be asked during interviews at Google or Goldman Sachs or simply on IQ exams, the sharpness of mind is generally associated with engineers due to the level of difficulty their tasks are assumed to entail.
  • Social Context: The informant believes to have obtained this riddle unintentionally while browsing the internet. He tends to share this riddle exclusively to friends who study STEM subjects as he believes they would most appreciate solving such problems. Although his goal isn’t to make listeners feel inferior for not being able to answer correctly, the informant appreciates stumping his audiences and spurring curiosity.

Item:

Audio Transcript:

  • (0:51) “You have a three-gallon pail and a five-gallon pail and a stream of water. How would you make exactly four gallons?…See you fill five gallons up and you put as much as you can into the three-gallon bucket. You empty [the three-gallon bucket] out. You put the remaining two gallons into the three-gallon bucket. Fill the five-gallon bucket up all the way again. And so you pour as much as you can into the three-gallon bucket. So there’s only space for one gallon left. So then the three-gallon bucket is full and there are four gallons left in the five-gallon bucket.”

Informant’s Comments:

  • Shailin jokingly hopes that during an interview he will be asked this riddle since he knows its solution by heart. He hopes to learn more of this type of folklore from his peers because it is so satisfying.

Collector’s Comments:

  • I was embarrassed to not have come close to obtaining the solution during the interview, as Shailin and I were both Math team captains from the same high school after all!

Collector’s Name: Aadil Islam

Tags/Keywords:

  • verbal folklore
  • jokes