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It’s Follow-Up Friday: Sharknado puzzle edition!
Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!
By this time, you know the drill. Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.
And today, we’re returning to the subject of holidays.
I like to talk about puzzly holidays, but this week has marked more of a cinematic holiday.
Yes, for the third summer in a row, a Sharknado movie has rampaged across our screens, bringing ridiculous action and inexplicable acts of shark-fighting heroism to millions of viewers.
And I thought to myself, what better way is there to mark the occasion than to create a Sharknado-themed deduction puzzle?
So that’s exactly what I did! Enjoy!
Sharknados are terrorizing cities across America! Every day, one of our heroes (April, Claudia, Fin, Gilbert, or Nova) has bravely ventured into a sharknado-afflicted city, armed with a weapon (baseball bat, chainsaw, grenade, laser, or rifle.)
No two heroes were in the same city on the same day, and no hero used any weapon more than once. No weapon was used more than once in the same day, nor was any weapon used more than once in the same city. Can you complete the schedule chart below?
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It takes two to puzzle…
I’m always on the lookout for new and different puzzle styles to discuss here, because there’s a seemingly endless supply of puzzly inventiveness in the world, and I endeavor to share as much of it as possible with my fellow PuzzleNationers.
A few days ago, I was reminded of a brain teaser variation that’s a little different from our usual fare, and I thought I’d put it in the spotlight.
Today, we’re talking about guided lateral thinking puzzles!
Let me start you off with a standard lateral thinking puzzle (which is a fancy way of saying “brain teaser”). This one is an all-time favorite of mine:
A man is found murdered on the floor with 53 bicycles scattered around the room. How did he die?
Now, this may sound like a particularly violent end at a local bike shop, but the lateral thinkers and brain teaser proficient types out there have probably already sussed out the true answer.
The man cheated at cards and was killed for it. Bicycle is a famous brand of playing cards, and with 52 cards in your standard deck, 53 implies cheating.
That’s a pretty simple one.
The difference between regular brain teasers like that one and guided lateral thinking puzzles is that a guided lateral thinking puzzle requires two people: one to ask questions in the hopes of solving it, and the other to know the solution and answer the other player’s questions with only yes or no responses.
The scenarios are often more involved than your usual brain teaser, but you’re only given a brief story to start with. These are not rigid brain teasers like the seesaw one we tackled earlier this year. These puzzles depend on your ability to narrow down the possibilities with strategically worded questions.
Here’s an example of a guided lateral thinking puzzle:
Ann, Ben, and Chris are siblings who were conceived on the same day. This year, Ann will be attending third grade while Ben and Chris attend kindergarten. Why?
While you could try to come up with a solution with just this information, guided lateral thinking puzzles encourage you to talk through your suspicions as you ask questions and uncover the truth.
So, what would you ask? What’s your starting theory? (My first instinct was to go straight to imagining how Leap Day was involved, before quickly realizing that was a ridiculous supposition.)
But maybe you have a better theory. Were they conceived by different people? Was it the same day, but different years?
Posing these questions to your partner in puzzly crime could help you find the answer.
The folks at I09 posted a link to six guided lateral thinking puzzles (including the Ann/Ben/Chris one I mentioned above). Give it a listen and try cracking these puzzles alongside the podcasters!
And let me know how you did! Did you solve any of them right away? Did any of them thoroughly stump you? And would you like to see more puzzles like this on PuzzleNation Blog in the future?
Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!
The art (and science) of optical illusions
Visual trickery plays an important role in puzzles. It can be the clever rebus that challenges you to find the words each image represents, or a visual brain teaser that forces you to think outside the box.
But nowhere in the realm of puzzles is visual trickery more obvious or more disconcerting than in optical illusions. Some are simple, like the famous old woman/young woman image above (or this hilarious video version). But others are not only more complex, they’re absolutely mind-bending.
And if we’re talking mind-bending optical illusions, at some point, you have to mention the work of Akiyoshi Kitaoka.
[Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s “A Bulge,” featuring nothing but squares.]
Dr. Kitaoka is a professor of psychology at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan, and he has extensively studied biology and psychology. He has quickly emerged as a modern master of optical illusions, utilizing not only shapes and color gradients to trick the eye, but also to simulate motion in a static image!
Two of the techniques frequently cited in his work with illusions are perceptual transparency and visual completion. Both rely heavily on how our brain and eye process the incredible amount of information we perceive every second of every day.
This is probably the most famous example of a visual completion illusion:
Basically, our brain employs mental shortcuts in order to simplify the information. For instance, visual completion (also known as filling-in) occurs when information unavailable to the eye is assumed to be there and mentally added by the brain.
Perceptual transparency, on the other hand, involves how we can perceive one surface behind another.
Check out this amazing photo from a published paper on perceptual transparency, entitled Zen Mountains:
[The mountains in the background look transparent,
even appearing to overlap each other in impossible ways.]
Dr. Kitaoka’s illusions utilize visual shortcuts and processes such like these, but his most famous creations involve a perceptual technique known as the Fraser-Wilcox Illusion, which involves using lighter and darker gradients of black and white in order to trick the eye into perceiving motion. Essentially, moving from dark to light gradually creates the illusion of motion.
Kitaoka’s work, however, maximizes this effect by employing contrasting color schemes in order to challenge the eye further.
Feast your eyes upon “Rotating Snakes,” Kitaoka’s most diabolical optical illusion:
[For the full effect, click the image and
scroll down for a full-screen version!]
By employing color as well, the rotation illusion is even more striking. In all honesty, I can’t look at it too long or my stomach starts to feel a little off-kilter!
Similarly, Kitaoka tricks the eye into perceiving waves rolling diagonally over this quilt-like sheet in “Primrose’s Field:”
As we understand more about the eye and how it perceives the visual stimuli it receives, as well as more about the brain and how it processes information, I suspect we’ll be able to craft even more convincing, mind-blowing, and unnerving examples of visual sleight of hand.
And undoubtedly, Akiyoshi Kitaoka will be leading the way.
Many thanks to Dr. Kitaoka for granting permission for me to feature three of his illusions in this post. You can check out more of his amazing work on his website, as well as some of his books on Amazon here!
Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!
It’s Follow-Up Friday: Puzzle Book edition!
Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!
By this time, you know the drill. Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.
And today, I’m posting the results of our #PennyDellPuzzleBooks hashtag game!
You may be familiar with the board game Schmovie, hashtag games on Twitter, or @midnight’s Hashtag Wars segment on Comedy Central.
For the last few months, we’re been collaborating on puzzle-themed hashtag games with our pals at Penny/Dell Puzzles, and this month’s hook was Penny/Dell Broadway Puzzles!
Examples might be The Lord of the Diamond Rings or The Da Vinci Codeword or Alphabet Soup for the Soul.
So, without further ado, check out what the puzzlers at PuzzleNation and Penny/Dell Puzzles came up with!
Charlotte’s Spider’s Web
Right Angles and Demons
The Grapes of Word Math
The Scarlet Letterboxes / The Scarlet Letter Logic
The Fault in Our Starspell / The Fault in Our Star Words
Harry Potter and the Halftime Prince
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stepping Stones
Brave New Word Seeks / Brave New Word Games
The Lion, the Witch, and the Word Seek
The Wizard Words of Oz
The “Mystery Person” of Edward Drood
To Kill a Missing Word (List)
The Fountainheads & Tails Word Seek
Around the Block in Eighty Days / Around the Bend in 80 Days
A Tale of Two-Step Cities
The Three of a Kind Musketeers
Oh, the Places, Please You’ll Go!
Peyton’s Places, Please
Anagrams Karenina
Anagram of Green Gables
North & South of Eden
The Swiss Family Robinson Ties
Bowl Game of Thrones
Ender’s Bowl Game
Fahrenheit Two for One / Fahrenheit 451 and Only
Sudoku Road
Cryptograms Wake / Fill-Ins Wake / Figgerits Wake
Kakuro Pioneers!
Little Puzzler on the Prairie
First and Last of the Mohicans
The Picture Sleuth of Dorian Gray / The Picture This of Dorian Gray
Watership Spelldown
Buried Treasure Island
The Countdown of Monte Cristo
Take It from There to Eternity
The Sign of Four Corners / The Big Four Corners
The Doomsday Bookworms
Great Crostictations
A Wrinkle in Time Machine
The Perks of Being a WallFlower Power
Catch-22 for One
The Hotel on the Poet’s Corner of Bitter and Sweet
50 Shades of Grey Shadows
The Joy Luck Crosswords Club
Jurassic Park What’s Left
My What’s Left Foot
Only The Shadow Knows
From Alphabet Soup to Nuts
Match Up Made in Heaven
Beat the Clock-work Orange
A Hive for a Honeycomb
Star Words
The Lost Symbol-lic Logic
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ringmaster
The Sylla-rillion
The Hunger Word Games
198-Four Square
The Sum Totals Also Rises
And one overachiever…
The “Lion” (‘Em Up), the “Which” (Way Words), and the “Word”robe by C(ircle) S(ums) Lewis
We also received a terrific one from @_Screenhog, Cross Sums of All Fears!
Have you come up with any Penny/Dell Puzzle Books of your own? Let us know! We’d love to see them!
Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!
A puzzle hunt 100 years in the making!
Riddles, codebreaking, and scavenger hunts are three of my favorite puzzly topics. I’ve covered each extensively in blog posts previously, exploring not only the history and ever-changing nature of puzzles, but how deeply ingrained puzzle-solving is in our culture, past and present.
Tuesday’s post was about a fairly simple encoded puzzle I found lurking inside a short story. That simplicity, that accessibility is part of why I wrote about it.
For you see, fellow puzzlers, today’s post is not about a simple puzzle. Today’s post covers all three of the topics above — riddles, codebreaking, and scavenger hunts — in a sprawling, mindboggling story about a globe-spanning mystery that gamers and puzzlers joined forces to unravel.
It all started in April 2012 with the release of a video game called Trials Evolution, created by the game designers at Redlynx.
Trials Evolution is a motorcycle racing game that incorporates real-world physics into the gameplay, challenging players to complete obstacle-filled courses as fast as possible.
Now, this might not seem like the type of game to conceal a fiendish riddle, but players were actually expecting a challenging puzzle to be hiding within the game, because Trials HD, a previous installment of the series, featured a riddle to solve that helped build the Trials gaming community.
So expectations were high for whatever riddle was lurking inside Trials Evolution. And it did not disappoint.
First, players had to locate a series of wooden planks throughout the game, planks that featured encrypted writing on them. Once assembled and decrypted, the planks featured instructions for a special maneuver for players to perform in the game while a particular piece of music played.
Successfully completing this task earned the player a bonus song, which included lyrics suggesting players transform the song into a visual form. Cagey players realized this meant running a spectral analysis on the song — a visual graph of sound or energy — which revealed a hidden message in Morse Code.
That message led to a website where the images below started appearing daily, one by one.
(It’s worth noting that these images started appearing in late 2013, more than a year after the game was released!)
Each image references a particular scientist. Once all twenty-six images were revealed, the indefatigable players had a visual alphabet to work with.
So when a message appeared using the images instead of letters, players cracked that code as well.
Still with me?
That code led to four sets of coordinates. Real world coordinates across the world! This riddle was only getting more complex the deeper players went!
Something awaited intrepid players in San Francisco, California; Bath, England; Helsinki, Finland; and Sydney, Australia. In each location, players uncovered small chests, each containing a key and a metal plaque with the message “It seemed like forever ago” on it. (The Helsinki location also featured French documents, supposedly from 300 years ago, as well as an antique pocket watch.)
So, what do the keys open? What does it all mean?
Well, there was one last message. On the other side of the metal plaque included in each chest, there was a message:
Midday in Year 2113.
1st Sat in Aug
One of Five keys will open the box
Underneath the Eiffel Tower
That’s right. This riddle can only be unraveled nearly a century from now! This puzzle has gone from a hidden bonus feature in a video game to actual scavenger hunting in the real world, and is now becoming a multigenerational quest.
Take a moment and ponder that. It blows my mind to think about a puzzle that took dozens of people to conquer and will now become a story told to friends and sons and daughters as golden keys are passed down, all in the hopes of seeing what awaits us underneath the Eiffel Tower on a particular day in August in 2113.
And it all started with a motorcycle racing video game.
[For more details on the Trials Evolution riddle, check out this thorough write-up on Kotaku.]
Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!
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