Puzzling in the Streets

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Want to make a fast $100? I thought so. Here’s what you need to do: Get yourself to Manhattan, and explore the city from 14th Street up to 125th Street. Somewhere in there, you will see a posterboard with some strange writing on it, much like this:

If that looks like a puzzle, that’s because it is. And if you’re the first to find and solve it, you’ll win the hundred bucks. I have no idea who’s behind this, or why they’re doing it — you would think that a group giving away $500 a week might have a more explanatory Web site. But hey, let’s not complain. It’s money for solving puzzles! Go get it!

When puzzle-themed supervillains team up

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It’s not pretty.

Click to enlarge slightly.

(Via Comic Book Resources, with thanks to Joe Cabrera.)

Wokka Wokka

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With the news that Puerto Rico has voted in favor of statehood, great portions of the Internet have turned their attention to what a 51-star flag would look like. Math nerds probably have an edge–they’re good at patterns, after all–so the most attractive options are being offered up by folks like Ed Pegg of mathpuzzle.org.

But my personal favorite, found on a Reddit thread by Laughing Squid, is this one:

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.

Men in Hats

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This logic puzzle has been making the rounds lately, and it’s quite nifty:

Shown above are four men buried up to their necks in the ground. They cannot move, so they can only look forward. Between A and B is a brick wall which cannot be seen through.

They all know that between them they are wearing four hats–two black and two white–but they do not know what color they are wearing. Each of them know where the other three men are buried.

In order to avoid being shot, one of them must call out to the executioner the color of their hat. If they get it wrong, everyone will be shot. They are not allowed to talk to each other and have 10 minutes to fathom it out.

After one minute, one of them calls out.

Question: Which one of them calls out? Why is he 100% certain of the color of his hat?

The answer can be found here.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Boxing Day

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Every time I read one of these articles about secret puzzle boxes, I have to be physically restrained from emptying out my wallet and sending all the money to a site like Cleverwood.