Brainteaser: Nightclub Password

(Image credit: Flickr user Thomas Hawk)

Uncle John took us out to an exclusive nightclub, and wouldn't you know it -Ol' Jay was the bouncer. "You can't come in unless you know the password!" he barked. Then a man came up to the door and Jay said, "12."

The man replied, "6," and Jay let him in.

Then a woman walked up and Jay said, "6."

The woman replied, "3," and was let in.

Brian exclaimed "This is easy!" and stepped up to the entrance.

Jay said, "8."

Brian replied, "4."

Jay yelled, "Wrong! Now go away!"

While we were driving back home to the Bathroom Reader Institute, Uncle John figured out what Brian should have said. What was it?

Think about it, and then when you give up, continue reading to see the answer.

Highlight the answer here:

The password was the amount of letters in the spelled-out number that Jay said. So the password for "8" was "5."

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The article above was reprinted with permission from the Bathroom Institute's book Uncle John's Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute has published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

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The issue with such number pattern based riddles and questions, is there are an infinite number of possible patterns that would make it work, and it comes down to figuring out which one they probably intended (which is a little bit obvious here after one has seen enough number riddles using the letters that spell out a number). But if the password were instead: given an x by the bouncer evaluate the function f(x)=[(4-K)x^2+(18K-68)x+288-72K]/8, you would get the same first two answers, and then the third answer would be K. So you could make up whatever password you want to match whatever third number you want to be the answer.

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In the real world, it would be easily explained that Jay liked the first two people and didn't particularly like Brian.

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I like how it says "when you give up"

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They make it seem like it's numerical when it's really in a whole other area. Like the analogy question "Hard is to concrete as soft is to up, down, left, or right?

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