After a break of two years due to the pandemic, the Vienna Ball of Sciences was again held again on 28 January 2023 in the Vienna City Hall (Rathaus). It was a night of dancing, music, and …. logic riddles! Due to the success of our bee puzzle at the last ball, the Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms has once again engaged people’s minds with a problem that may be solved with logical reasoning.

The year 2022 marked the anniversary of Gregor Mendel’s 200th birthday. As Mendel researched the inheritance of traits, this year’s logical problem was based on family relations. The puzzle “family ties” required visitors to discover who was related to whom, and to determine each person’s hair and eye color. The author of the puzzle was Anouk Michelle Oudshoorn, a doctoral student at the Institute of Logic and Computation at TU Wien. You may download the puzzle here, and then see if you arrived at the correct solution! The fastest visitor to solve the puzzle on the evening of the ball was Lukas Wimmer, a student of physics at TU Wien – congratulations! Below are pictures of Lukas, other winners, and motivated visitors.

Since 2015, the Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms is a proud partner of the Vienna Ball of Sciences. The cooperation was co-initiated by the late Prof. Helmut Veith. VCLA has in collaboration with researchers and doctoral candidates of the FWF funded doctoral college Logical Methods in Computer Science – LogiCS contributed to the ball’s scientific character with activities that stir curiosity, such as logic riddles and human-machine interaction.