Author Archives: gmdirect

Puzzlin’ ’til the cows come home

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Yesterday Eric posted a link to a marvelous site called MazeLog, which features numerous puzzles that require a bit more brainpower than the average maze.

His post reminded me of a challenging maze puzzle I discovered last year in Ian Stewart’s deeply mathy and thoroughly engrossing book Cows in the Maze: And other mathematical explorations.

Basically, you have two starting points, and your first move can determine whether you complete the puzzle or not. All you have to do is follow the instructions, which sounds simple. Believe me, it isn’t.

“Where are the Cows?” (or “Cows in the Maze”) is impressive, to say the least, and I think it’s a worthy challenge for any dedicated puzzler. Enjoy!

(I know the image above is a little small. Click here for the full-sized version.)

Puzzle Tech Support, how may I help you?

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All of the best operatives have tech support. Bond has Moneypenny and Q. Batman has Oracle. Punisher has Microchip.

My older sister has me, your friendly neighborhood puzzlin’ fool.

Allow me to explain.

For a few years now, my older sister has competed in various rounds of the Great Urban Race, a city-centric version of The Amazing Race that combines trivia, puzzle-solving, and physical challenges. And an outrageous amount of running around.

(I understand there is a similar event in Canada known as the City Chase. And, of course, there’s the supremely puzzle-focused BAPHL, which Eric covered earlier this year.)

Since it’s damn near impossible to do research on the run, competitors are allowed to have someone as remote tech support to do the electronic legwork while the team is on the move. As a puzzle fiend and a world-class Googler, I was her first and only choice.

So last weekend, for the third time, I found myself hunkered down in front of my laptop with several Google windows prepped, waiting for text messages or emails to roll in.

The first time, she was in Philadelphia.

Where is the only digital printing studio in Philly with IRIS 3047 printer? Where is the Class of ’49 Bridge? What is the river that the St. James Brewery in Dublin is situated on?

And then the kicker. Where is this statue?

I hit Google Image Search immediately, but the dimensions on the picture simply didn’t match up with anything I could find in the Philadelphia area.

Which meant either the photo was compressed or otherwise distorted, or it was taken from a weird angle.

So I went with that, looking for any gargoyles with potential, or at least a similar shape. That’s when I stumbled upon an image from Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary.

They have two gargoyles that are put up on the main gateway in early September, since they do a special Halloween tour every year. They’d gone up on the ninth.

It turns out the picture was of the second gargoyle — the first, with an outstretched claw, was the one that kept turning up on Google Image Search — as shot from below.

Crafty, crafty.

The second GUR was New York City.

Find a certain restaurant. (No sweat.) Track down the business or organization behind a certain slogan. (Took a lot longer, because she gave me the wrong slogan.) Track down a business on a given street. (Nailed it quickly.) Find a theater under former names. (Again, no sweat.) Locate the largest rare goods shop. (Got it.) Unscramble a phrase to find a business’s name. (Anagrammed it in my head.)

But again, an image-search question was the most time-consuming. I had a cellphone-quality picture of a photocopy of a picture of a cigar store Indian statue, and I had to find the exact statue in Manhattan AND its location.

THAT was tedious. But I was eventually successful in tracking him down.

This time around, she was in Las Vegas (which I believe she and her partner qualified for after performing well in the New York City round).

There weren’t any tough Image Searches this time around — or if there were, she didn’t need my assistance with it — but my trivia and puzzle skills did come in handy again.

In one instance, a phone number was translated into another language, and I had to identify and decode the number. (It was Tagalog.)

My anagramming skills again came into play, but this time in a list of comic book titles and characters that had been scrambled. I was stumped by the last one, GECRSOSN MPRIRE, for a while, because while CONGRESS PRIMER immediately jumped to mind, that was total nonsense to me as a comic book fan. Googling that phrase did me no good, either.

It was a while before I started playing around with GECRSOSN again and remembered a defunct comic brand, CROSSGEN. CrossGen Primer. I excitedly texted her back with that.

The first puzzle she sent me, though, was easily the most puzzly of their challenges.

In this zero-ten numbered puzzle, complete this chain:
8 5 4 _ _ 7 _ 10 3 2 0

Did you get it? I’m sure you have by now. From there, it was a quick Google search for the address of a certain wedding chapel where their next challenge awaited them.

I’m sure she’ll participate again at some point, and when she does, I will be there, puzzle skills at the ready.

But in the meantime, let’s all keep calm, puzzle on, and I’ll catch you next time.

I hereby dub thee Sir Cuitous.

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Have you ever been jonesing for a puzzly challenge, but your phone’s dead and you don’t have any puzzle books with you and nobody wants to play 20 Questions or Hangman?

What is a desperate, puzzle-hungry person to do in a situation like this?

Well, if you’ve got a chessboard and a knight (or just some graph paper and a pencil, if you want to go bare-bones with it), you’ve got a puzzle waiting to happen.

It’s called a knight’s tour, and the challenge is to place the knight anywhere on the board and, moving the piece as you would in a regular game of chess, you hit every square on the board once.

It’s tougher than you’d think, and if you desire an even greater challenge, you could go for a closed tour, where the knight touches every square just once AND returns to the starting square.

Knight’s tours are common mathematical problems for computer science and programming students to this day, with the endgame being to write an algorithm that will find a knight’s tour for a given grid.

A variation on the knight’s tour is the uncrossed knight’s tour, where the goal is the same but you’ve got the added wrinkle of not being able to cross your knight’s path at any point.

But you don’t have to stick to an 8×8 grid by any means. Any square or rectangular grid can offer a suitable challenge to the aspiring knight’s tour hunter.

There’s nothing quite like a DIY brain teaser to keep your wits sharp. So no matter where you are, remember to keep calm and puzzle on. I’ll catch you next time.

A 9-letter word for candy and costume-fueled fun.

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Greetings, fellow puzzle solvers and enigma enthusiasts! Happy Halloween to you and yours!

I had a lot of fun a few weeks ago scouring the Internet for pictures of puzzle-centric tattoos, and with today being the most costume-y of holidays (unless you dress up for Bastille Day or the Fourth of July or something), I thought I’d wander back out into the wilds of the Internet and see what kind of puzzly costumes are out there.

Naturally, I would be remiss if I didn’t post at least one picture of the most famous of the puzzly supervillains from pop culture, so here is your prescribed dose of Batman villain The Riddler, nabbed from deviantart.com’s Dubya87.

Now, when you’re doing any sort of puzzle-focused image searching on the Internet, you’re bound to get jigsaws as well as pen-and-paper puzzles.

There were numerous examples of couples, pairs, and groups going as interlocking jigsaw puzzle pieces, but that’s not really the sort of puzzle costume I was going for. Nonetheless, this jigsaw puzzle costume rendition of Van Gogh’s Starry Night is really impressive, so I’ll share it with the puzzle world at large anyway.

But let’s get down to business. Puzzle costume business, which I daresay is the best kind of business, outside of being paid to eat ice cream.

Astonishingly, there’s simply not a lot of crossword-themed costume play going on. I know! I was surprised too! I did, however, find these crossword grid-patterned pajamas, which could easily double as a costume, or examwear for a tardy college student.

From crosswords, it’s a quick hop to Scrabble costumes, which seem to be much more popular!

This was my favorite of the “replicating the board” costumes I found.

And, naturally, there’s an awkward mass-produced costume along the same lines, which looks both uncomfortable and a bit too pillowy for my tastes.

From there, we get into the more creative interpretations. This woman seems inordinately proud of her Scrabble board dress.

This homemade dress is absolutely adorable. I only wish I’d been able to find a better picture.

And, as above, there’s a “sassy” mass-produced version of the Scrabble dress.

(There’s a more scandalous variation on that costume as well, but for propriety’s sake, let’s ignore that and move onward.)

Sudoku! While not as popular a costume choice as Scrabble, I still had little trouble tracking down several choice examples of sudokuriffic costumes. (Though I really doubt that’s a puzzle of three-star difficulty.)

I’m not sure how racially sensitive this guy’s Sudoku accoutrements are, but it certainly adds some flair to his interactive Sudoku board.

And then there’s this guy! Kudos on finding an appropriately-scaled giant pencil for your Sudoku board. (In case you’re trying to solve his costume, as far as I can tell his forehead is 8, and his mouth 4 or 5. Good luck!)

And, as before, here’s the weird mass-produced costume version for Sudoku. I respect that they kept it to a 4×4 grid, but I still can’t imagine anyone wearing it.

Now, when it comes to puzzles and puzzly games, it’s hard to imagine a more visual one than the Rubik’s Cube. Simple shape, great colors, and instantly recognizable. Somewhere, there are photos of my oldest sister in a Rubik’s Cube costume. (Had I been able to locate them, I would absolutely have posted them here.)

But do not fear. There are plenty of marvelous Rubik’s Cube costume pics on the Internet, and I’m happy to post a few of my favorites.

This one is outstanding. Not only is the center row offset, but I’m pretty sure you can actually spin those rows!

(I imagine it’s quite difficult getting him in and out of the car. I had a similarly boxy Optimus Prime costume as a child and got wedged in the backseat for at least ten minutes.)

This one is undoubtedly an improvised dorm room costume, but it’s still terrific.

I think the young lady’s expression is what really sells this one. She’s obviously proud of getting three yellow squares on a single side.

Okay, I promise that this is the last weird mass-produced costume. But it’s so bizarre and mod that I couldn’t NOT post it. I mean, look at that hat!

I’ve saved the best two for last. The first will instantly ring bells for anyone who has played the puzzletastic Professor Layton video game series. It’s the Professor himself, alongside Luke and Flora!

And, in conclusion, here’s my favorite puzzle-themed costume, and the one that actually inspired the entry.

Yup, two Tetris pieces. Hilarious and very sweet all at once.

Happy Halloween, puzzle fiends of all ages! Keep calm, puzzle on, enjoy your candy, and I’ll catch you next time.

I spy with my puzzler’s eye…

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007 AcrossYou know, it occurs to me that many of the skills in the standard puzzle-solver’s arsenal would serve you well in the high-stakes cutthroat world of Hollywood-style espionage.

Now, I’m not saying that a facility with sudoku means you can avoid rockets in your Aston Martin or that mad crossword skills will help you foil a supervillain’s million-strong chocolate soldier army preparing to overwhelm Switzerland and secure their private banks for him/herself.

But there is definitely some overlap in the mental dexterity department.

Think about it. Beyond the numerous trivial bits and bobs of information that are squirreled away in the heads of puzzlers that could prove utterly essential in a pinch — the capital of Burkina Faso? Why that’s Ouagadougou! — there are plenty of spy-centric situations that call for a puzzly knack.

There’s nothing like a Rubik’s Cube to teach you patience and spatial reasoning. A facility with anagrams wordplay suggests strong alternate thinking and deduction is at work (and no doubt helps with timely quips and tension-defusing asides).

Who better than a cryptograms whiz to crack the villain’s secret code? Or a Cut the Rope/Angry Birds fan to quickly puzzle out where to throw an apple to topple a ladder that then catapults a ficus into the air that hits a nameless goon square on the noggin and who then hits the giant red release button on your cell door and sets you free?

While neutralizing a bomb with a timer steadily counting down to destruction might seem tense, it’s nothing new to the iron will and sure hand of a person who has navigated the harrowing “you’re near the top of the screen” escalation of music in a high-level game of Tetris. If your nerves can take that, you’re ready for anything.

I don’t know about you, but I’m thoroughly convinced. In fact, I might just stop the blog entry right here and start penning the whimsically thrilling adventures of Trent Puzzlington, Agent of PuzzleNation. First installment: The Rebus of Doom!

But until then, keep calm, puzzle on — the puzzle community, heck, even the world might need your services one day! — and I’ll catch you next time.

I’m looking for a Word Chain reaction.

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Part of being a fan of crosswords is enjoying the interaction of across and down entries as they construct an entire grid under the tip of your pencil (or pen, if you’re hardcore about it).

Part of constructing crosswords and similar puzzles is being able to build those grids, laying out words in an intricately woven lattice of linguistic delights (and occasional words-you-only-see-in-crosswords, like NENE or ELHI.)

But some puzzles rely more heavily on letter placement and interaction. (For one impressively visual example, there’s the Rows Garden puzzle Eric posted on Monday.)

I don’t know if there’s a more official version of this puzzle out there in the untamed wilds of the puzzle world, but I call it Word Chain (or Word Loops), and it takes letter placement and interaction to another level.

In Word Chain, the solver is given clues to a series of six-letter words. The “chain” (or “loop”, if you prefer) aspect comes from the answers themselves. The last three letters of one answer become the first three letters of the next answer, and so on down the line, until the final answer’s last three letters are the same as the first answer’s first three letters, completing the chain.

For instance, here’s a 9-entry Word Chain:

Toyota model                  _ _ _ _ _ _
Basement                       _ _ _ _ _ _
More massive                 _ _ _ _ _ _
Like some shepherds?   _ _ _ _ _ _
Devoted insect?              _ _ _ _ _ _
Cold-sufferer’s need       _ _ _ _ _ _
Soft-surfaced leathers     _ _ _ _ _ _
Tyrant                              _ _ _ _ _ _
Sherman or Harry           _ _ _ _ _ _

The biggest advantage to the solver is that one answer provides valuable clues for the neighboring answers. Let’s say you can’t think of the first or second words, but LARGER immediately jumps to mind as the answer to the third.

You fill it in:

Toyota model                  _ _ _ _ _ _
Basement                       _ _ _ _ _ _
More massive                L A R G E R
Like some shepherds?   _ _ _ _ _ _
Devoted insect?              _ _ _ _ _ _
Cold-sufferer’s need       _ _ _ _ _ _
Soft-surfaced leathers     _ _ _ _ _ _
Tyrant                              _ _ _ _ _ _
Sherman or Harry           _ _ _ _ _ _

And then you place the connected parts of the Word Chain above and below:

Toyota model                  _ _ _ _ _ _
Basement                        _ _ _ L A R
More massive                 L A R G E R
Like some shepherds?   G E R _ _ _
Devoted insect?              _ _ _ _ _ _
Cold-sufferer’s need       _ _ _ _ _ _
Soft-surfaced leathers     _ _ _ _ _ _
Tyrant                              _ _ _ _ _ _
Sherman or Harry           _ _ _ _ _ _

And suddenly, CELLAR and GERMAN spring to mind.

Now, while I haven’t completed this one, you can probably see where it’s going, with MANTIS as the next answer down the chain.

I think the inherent challenge of such an interconnected word list is what I enjoy most about constructing this puzzle.

Oddly enough, this puzzle actually becomes easier to construct the longer it is. Here’s a 13-entry version of Word Chain I whipped up just for the blog.

Jesus’s teachings        _ _ _ _ _ _
Of the hip area             _ _ _ _ _ _
Winner                         _ _ _ _ _ _
Rotation force              _ _ _ _ _ _
Canadian province      _ _ _ _ _ _
Transform into             _ _ _ _ _ _
Breakfast dish             _ _ _ _ _ _
Deadly                         _ _ _ _ _ _
Make holy                    _ _ _ _ _ _
Farthest down             _ _ _ _ _ _
Writer Friesner           _ _ _ _ _ _
“The Munsters” dad    _ _ _ _ _ _
Tropical fruits             _ _ _ _ _ _

With more time to build a chain back to the first entry, the puzzle’s loop is far easier to complete. But I set myself the challenge of creating the smallest Word Chain that still offered some challenge. (After all, while CANCAN would be a Word Chain in itself, it’s not the most taxing puzzle in the world, either to construct or solve.)

I settled on a four-line Word Chain, which was hands down the most difficult Word Chain I’ve yet constructed, because of the severe limitations the short word count imposed.

Nonetheless, here you go:

Hindu chant           _ _ _ _ _ _
Qualities               _ _ _ _ _ _
The very thing       _ _ _ _ _ _
Danny or Jenna    _ _ _ _ _ _

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s post, and that Word Chains provided you with a bit of brain-teasing fun for the day. Keep calm, puzzle on, and I’ll catch you next time.