These are usually known as Zebra puzzles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra_Puzzle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra_Puzzle There's a very famous one apoc

These are usually known as Zebra puzzles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra_Puzzle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra_Puzzle There's a very famous one apocryphally attributed to Einstein: https://udel.edu/~os/riddle.html https://udel.edu/~os/riddle.html Searching for the term "zebra puzzle" will net many results e.g.: https://www.brainzilla.com/logic/zebra/ https://www.brainzilla.com/logic/zebra/ They can be solved by hand, as you've noted, with vanilla Prolog using the technique in the article, or with constraint logic programming for which Prolog has a very powerful library (vanilla Prolog is just doing an exhaustive search.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_logic_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_logic_programming http://www.swi-prolog.org/man/clpfd.html http://www.swi-prolog.org/man/clpfd.html Another approach is to translate them into an exact cover problem and feed them into a solver like DLX. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exact_cover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exact_cover https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/exact-cover-problem-algorithm-x-set-2-implementation-dlx/ https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/exact-cover-problem-algorithm-... This class of problem is NP-complete so don't feel bad if larger problems are too hard to solve - no one knows how to solve them efficiently!