I have 3 unmarked jars in my kitchen; each contains a white powder. One is sugar, one is salt, and one is pure mono sodium glutamate. If guests want sugar in their tea, they must first work out which jar is the sugar, by solving the puzzle.

I want to think up a puzzle involving these jars - each jar would have a label with a riddle on it, and it would be a logic puzzle, whereby the clues on each jar give away the contents. But, as there are only 3 jars (and I don't have any other white powders) I'm having a hard time thinking of a decent puzzle.

Anybody got any ideas? The riddles have to be short enough to fit on a label on the side of the jar, and there has to be only 1 logical outcome of the puzzle. This is the best I have come up with:

Sugar jar: "The jar of salt is telling a lie; The jar of MSG is telling the truth."
Salt Jar: "This is sugar."
MSG Jar: "This is MSG"

The thing is, there are a few ways around that it could be. Supposing guests are only required to solve the puzzle for sugar (MSG in tea tastes horrible...). It would have to be something similar to this, but so that its possible to acertain exactly which jar contains the sugar.

Any ideas?

"Slap your host around until he tells you which one is the sugar."

Maybe just have a picture of the molecule printed on the outside.

One of the jars should probably be poison. Most people will just take a small taste to figure out which one is sugar. They won't if they know it might kill them though.

I was gonna start researching the qualities of each but...


Each jar tells only one truth.

#1
I have both an 's' and an 'a' in my name.
My third letter is the same as the jar directly below me.

#2
I have an 'r' in my name.
I have a 'g' in my name.

#3
My first letter is not an 's.'
I have no letter 'g' in my name.


Not sure if that's too much for your labels (and you could probably shorten it). This is also just an example and I didn't really test if it actually works.

if your house guests are anywhere near drunk and unsupervised they will just lift the one that says "this is sugar" without considering the existence of a puzzle.