It’s Independence Day, and is there any better way to celebrate the marvelous mixing pot of American culture than some holiday anagrams? I hardly think so!
Unscramble the following phrases to uncover some Fourth of July words and phrases, and enjoy!
Penny Aced Indeed
Flared Prosy Kiwis
Horologic Gent Kiln
Legend For Merit
Attend Suites
Nice Solo
It’s Spartan Dress
Phi Alpha Deli
Answers will be posted on the blog tomorrow afternoon! Enjoy your day!
As promised, here are the answers to Friday’s PuzzleNation live game, a.k.a. the Tom Swifties challenge! Thank you to everyone who gave it a shot. I look forward to doing another live puzzle game soon!
1.) “This is all from memory,” Tom… wrote.
2.) “That just doesn’t add up,” said Tom… nonplussed.
3.) “There’s no need for silence,” Tom… allowed.
4.) “Little devils don’t always tell the truth,” Tom… implied.
5.) “You don’t see the point, do you?” asked Tom… stabbing in the dark.
6.) “No test throw,” thought Tom… triflingly.
7.) “The exit is right there,” Tom… pointed out.
1.) “I can take photographs if I want to!” Tom… snapped.
2.) “That’s already been taken care of,” Tom… pretended.
3.) “She’s repeating an SOS message,” said Tom… remorsefully.
4.) “I only have diamonds, clubs and spades,” said Tom… heartlessly.
5.) “I’m covering the neighborhood with heavy cotton cloth,” said Tom… canvassing the area.
6.) “I’ve deduced that this is the right way,” said Tom… pathologically.
7.) “I have a split personality,” said Tom… being frank.
And if there’s some kind of live game puzzle challenge you’d like to see, be sure to let us know! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or contact us here!
I’ve always been a big fan of DIY puzzling. With seven nieces and nephews to keep engaged and entertained at family gatherings, I often find myself cobbling together new games and puzzles for them from whatever I can find around me.
(For instance, you’d be surprised how many board games are spiced up a bit by the addition of dinosaur figurines.)
So last weekend, I discovered my youngest nieces have three of those ring-stacking toys with the colored rings, the ones I think every kid has played with at some point or another.
And I realized I had all the tools necessary to whip up a challenge for the kids and adults alike… a Tower of Hanoi puzzle.
The Tower of Hanoi puzzle and its many variants look simple, but can be fiendishly puzzling. The rules are simple: move the stack of rings from the first post to the third. You move one ring at a time, and at no point can you place a larger ring atop a smaller ring.
(The standard puzzle is five rings, but variants can go as high as 10.)
I gave the adults first crack at it, and after laughing it off as childishly simple, it took them far longer than expected to solve the puzzle, especially in the later stages as you try to place the largest ring. There was plenty of pointing and strategy and “No, no, not there! THERE!”
The kids, on the other hand, worked together, and managed to solve the puzzle in about fifteen minutes, each taking turns moving colored rings here and there (and for my youngest niece, occasionally biting them, as you do). Their sense of accomplishment was a joy to watch, and each crowed to their parents about their victory.
As a placement puzzle, the Tower of Hanoi is much like a sudoku puzzle, a combination of strategy — where to place a number or a ring — and deduction — determining which moves you can’t make based on the information provided. It’s one of those universal puzzle-solving skills that will serve a puzzle fiend well for decades to come.
(To try the Tower of Hanoi puzzle, check out this online version I found.)
A British reader and friend of the blog passed along this link to me this morning. It’s from the UK publication The Guardian, interviewing filmmaking Steve Simmons about his newest production, Crosswords.
The seven-minute short film takes us into the thoughts of a man puzzling out various crossword clues, even as he’s distracted by an attractive woman who shares his park bench.
Most of the clues are fairly straightforward instead of the more wordplay-based British cluing — “Not right (4)”, for example — but others could give you as much pause as the protagonist. (I admit, “The more you take, the more you leave behind (9)” had my gears turning.)
Seeing synonyms and red herrings pass before the solver’s eyes (and settling onto the screen) was a marvelous touch, reminiscent of some of the visual panache of BBC’s Sherlock.
The silent film style adds a touch of tongue-in-cheek flair and melodrama to the whole affair, making for a thoroughly enjoyable short.
Hmmm. Makes me wonder if PuzzleNation should get into the short film game. Exploring space with the intrepid crew of Starspell Command, or heading into dusty puzzle catacombs in search of treasure with the Crossword Raider…
On second thought, maybe I’ll leave it to pros like Simmons.
Sudoku puzzles are as ubiquitous as reality shows these days, and enthusiastic solvers can find puzzles of nearly any difficulty with ease.
Sudoku puzzles are usually ranked from one to five stars, with five star puzzles being the most difficult. Difficulty can depend not only on the number of starting digits, but their placement and the level of deduction involved.
Sudoku enthusiasts were the first to notice that the lowest number of clues required for a unique solution is 17. Puzzles with 16 clues invariably had alternate solutions.
For comparison purposes, the average newspaper sudoku has 25 set numbers. The sudoku puzzles on PuzzleNation vary in difficulty, but our easy puzzles range from 30 to 36 clues and our expert puzzles range from 25 to 30 clues, with medium and hard puzzles clue counts falling in between.
But the 17-clue threshold was all conjecture until a mathematician from University College Dublin named Gary McGuire put in the time (and the computer processing power) to write a mathematical proof confirming the suspicions of sudoku enthusiasts.
He designed a specific computer algorithm to process various sudoku grid patterns, allowing him to cut down on the computing time necessary to verify his conjecture. (Even with the reduced computing time, it took 7 million CPU hours in total, a monumental amount of processing time.)
From the nature.com article:
The idea behind this was to search for what he calls unavoidable sets, or arrangements of numbers within the completed puzzle that are interchangeable and so could result in multiple solutions. To prevent the unavoidable sets from causing multiple solutions, the clues must overlap, or ‘hit’, the unavoidable sets. Once the unavoidable sets are found, it is a much smaller—although still non-trivial—computing task to show that no 16-clue puzzle can hit them all.
Of course, as I said before, difficulty isn’t just about the number of clues. The puzzle widely regarded as the world’s hardest sudoku puzzle has 21 clues, but their placement makes for a much more mentally-taxing solving exercise.
I guess it just goes to show the old real estate cliche is true: it’s all about location, location, location.
Not so long ago, I wrote a post about cryptography in the real world, highlighting moments where codebreaking made a difference in crime solving and espionage, and sometimes changed the course of history.
And while the encryptions featured in today’s entry aren’t quite as world-changing, they just as interesting.
I’m talking about the alien languages that were featured in the background of the animated television show Futurama.
At least two ciphers have been employed by the writers and animators of the show — a third is rumored to have appeared in the fourth season of the show, but there hasn’t been confirmation of that — and they’ve proven to be an engaging Easter egg for puzzle fans.
The first is called Alien Language One, or Alienese, and it appeared in the background of the show from the pilot episode onward. It’s a simple one-to-one code, with symbols for all 26 letters and 10 digits in standard English. (Supposedly it was solved by some enterprising puzzlers within a half-hour of the show’s premiere.)
A second, far more complex encryption started appearing during the show’s second season, and it’s called Alien Language Two, or Alienese II, and it’s based on an autokey cipher.
Autokey ciphers are more involved than a standard encryption, because there’s no one-to-one organizational structure. Instead, the symbol for a given letter or number can change based on the symbol that precedes it.
I’ll let the folks at the Futurama Wiki explain:
Each symbol has a numerical value. To decode a message, the first symbol’s value is translated directly into a character (0=’A’, 1=’B’, and so on). For the remaining letters, you subtract the previous symbol’s numerical value. If the result is less than zero, you add 26. Then that number is converted into a character as before.
This is some high-level puzzling, considering it’s a background joke-delivery system on an animated show. (But, considering the show does jokes about Schrodinger and throwaway gags based on mathematical principles like taxicab numbers, I’m not at all surprised.)
Of course, those puzzle-lovers at The Simpsons couldn’t help but get in on the fun, using Alienese as a background gag in a reference to the show Lost.
The masterminds at Futurama are definitely puzzlers at heart, and more than worthy of recognition in the Puzzles in Pop Culture library.
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