WHAT intuitively obvious test?

Jordan admitted years that was a joke, that he served at that Q&A the smart ass answer one of his physics teachers used to give his students when they didn't get a difficult problem. He admitted he was pulling our leg, and that he was enjoying it!!!

He even has contradicted the "intuitively obvious" joke elsewhere by saying there were some clues but no red flag. A red flag is slang for an obvious clue.... he said there were none!

The fact it's a joke aside, Graendal as a suspect is still perfectly obvious in TFOH. As the culprit (more than by a lucky guess) and in what circumstances no, but as a suspect certainly. It was even intuitively obvious to come up with the very simple theory that one of Forsaken allied with Rahvin was also in the palace, or came to the palace in the aftermath. I know for a fact it's an obvious reasoning to make because I bloody did it the first time I read that scene! So don't come and tell me Slayer is obvious and Graendal isn't! That's a totally ridiculous statement. NO ONE I've seen on any WOT website or newsgroup I've visited has brought up the theory that Slayer killed the BA in Tear or the Grey Men in the WT before WH revealed it! No one! So don't come and tell it's obvious Slayer did it because he killed before in the series.... It wasn't even obvious there was an executioner for the Shadow in the series, that Shadowspawn or a Forsaken didn't perform these deeds!

The closest someone may come to having Slayer as a suspect by intuition (not a pure guess, as your theory) is "hmmm.. maybe the person who eliminated the BA traitors in TDR also came to kill Asmodean". And that'd be a wrong reasonning because when you think this through by closer examinatiom of the text the circumstances of the death clearly indicated it wasn't an execution but a murder of opportunity, whereas in Tear it was an execution. So there's no obvious connection to make between the two events....

OTOH, it's perfectly simple to come up with possible reasons for Graendal and Sammael to have been in the palace and Asmodean stumbling on them by accident (ta'veren twist): they came to meet Rahvin and were very surprised to find the palace in an uproar and al'Thor apparently there - and remained around to find out what happened; they came for spies, they came to try to learn Rand's next move, they came to find out what happened because agents reported Rahvin's death, they came to check if Lanfear was now with Rand and had betrayed them all, they came to see if Rand was weakened enough by the duel they could take him out Etc., Etc. Some of these reasons don't stand the test of the next books and some do, but back in TFOH they were perfectly valid guesses that could come quite close to solving what happened. With LOC and ACOS, you can narrow it down some more, eliminate Demandred as another suspect, and Sammael, then Semirhage. And in those books and TPOD are the clues that the main remaining suspect, Graendal, seems to know something about Asmodean the others don't, and never something shows up that contradicted the notion she may have killed Asmodean. She had the means, she would have motives, and it's perfectly possible to reason out why she may have had the opportunity.