The logic puzzle below is attributed to Albert Einstein and it is said that only 2% of us can solve it.
The Puzzle
There are 5 houses in 5 different colours.
In each house lives a person with a different nationality.
These 5 owners drink a certain type of beverage, smoke a certain brand of cigar, and keep a certain pet.
No owners have the same pet, smoke the same brand of cigar or drink the same drink.
Hints
1. The Brit lives in a red house.
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The green house is on the left of the white house.
5. The green house owner drinks coffee.
6. The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds.
7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
8. The man living in the house right in the middle drinks milk.
9. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
10. The man who smokes Blend lives next door to the one who keeps cats.
11. The man who keeps horses lives next door to the man who smokes Dunhill.
12. The owner who smokes Blue Master drinks beer.
13. The German smokes Prince.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The man who smokes Blend has a neighbor who drinks water.
The Question: Who owns the fish?
At the CALUMO Group, we have been providing business intelligence and performance management solutions since 1998. To solve this puzzle, we viewed it as a typical business intelligence or data mining challenge where very often all the information required is available, but where the means to derive and present the answers is not that obvious. Here is how we answer these questions for our customers:
The Business Intelligence Perspective - Cubes, Dimensions and Elements
We broke the problem down into a matrix, or cube, comprising six dimensions with each dimension comprising five elements as follows:
We then combined the six dimensions into a cube. Physical cubes can only be three dimensions, but the representation below is a great way to visualize the concept of six or more dimensions. Start with the cube made up of 3 dimensions; Drinks, Smokes, Pets. This cube is then embedded into a further cube comprising; Houses, Nationality and Colour.
It's of significant interest at this stage to note that the puzzle only contains 30 populated data points (5 houses, 5 Nationalities, 5 Colours, 5 Drinks, 5 Smokes, 5 Pets). The possible data points or combinations are comparatively huge at 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 or 15,625. This phenomenon of few actual data points, but a large number of possible data points is referred to as sparse data and data explosion and is very typical of real life commercial business intelligence applications.
Remember, this puzzle only has 6 dimensions with only 5 elements in each dimension and only 5 transactions in total. Imagine a real business with dimensions like Customers or Products, which typically have hundreds or thousands of elements, and cubes with more than 6 dimensions and transaction numbers in the thousands or millions.
On a typical CALUMO assignment, we gather and transform data to support the business intelligence building blocks. We then integrate and present the data in a unified business intelligence and performance management application. The challenges we face and the business answers we provide are not too dissimilar to Einstein's puzzle.
So, it is no coincidence then that all of our consultants are able to derive the answer to Einstein's puzzle. Were you able to work it out, or more importantly, are you able to answer all the difficult business intelligence questions at your organization? If the answer is no to the first question, and if you're interested, we will be posting the solution to the puzzle next week.
If the answer is no to the second question, please contact us to find out how CALUMO can help you get the answers for stand-out business intelligence and performance management. If you were able to work out the answer (in less than 15 minutes), please contact us to consider a career in business intelligence at CALUMO 
- In addition to providing a solution next week, we will also be discussing the Data Mining perspective illustrated in Einstein's puzzle.
About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence. Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations. These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.