This week a 19X19 puzzle. My plan is to post five puzzles in this size and then take a break from mochikoro for a while to try other puzzles.
On this coming Saturday, June 17th, the Google US Puzzle Championship will be taking place. In order to participate, you have to register before before Thursday June 15th. You also need to block out two and a half hours starting at 1PM EDT. The winners will represent the US in the World Puzzle Competition in Bulgaria.
If you want to get an idea of what the competition is like, they have a number of tests from previous years.
Wei-Hwa’s challenge this week is a distance puzzle like the ones created by Erich Friedman. Wei-Hwa uses the puzzle to plug the Google US Puzzle Competition that is happening next Saturday (more on that later) and, I have to say, that competition is where I first came across distance puzzles.
Distance puzzles involve a series of circles arranged in a specific pattern. The object is to fill each cirle with the numbers from 1 to however many circles there are such that the distance between 2 and 3 is greater than the distance between 1 and 2, and so on. If you would like to see some examples of this puzzles, check out Erich’s page.
Wei-Hwa’s variation is a little bit different. He doesn’t require you to fill in all of the squares, and I haven’t decided yet if that makes it easier or harder. Also, his flash interface automatically calculates distances for you when you place numbers. (Do you remember your distance formula?) It might be a good idea to play around with his interface a little before you get solving, just so you can get a sense of how many possible unique distances there are betweem two numbers.
Writer, blogger, and puzzle enthusiast Debra Hamel has created a puzzle contest to celebrate the first anniversary of Buy A Friend A Book, a website aimed at promoting quarterly Buy A Friend A Book Weeks when readers are encouraged to buy books for people for no reason (other than the fact that it’s Buy A Friend A Book Week.)
The contest consists of seven puzzles of a variety of types that will appear on seven different sites over the seven days of the next BAFAB Week (July 1-7.) The list of sites where the puzzles will appear can be found on the BAFAB site. To win the competition, you will have to submit a correct answer to all seven puzzles by 10:00 AM PDT on July 8th. The winners will be chosen randomly from all correct submissions. And yes, there are prizes for the winners.
It should be fun. I’ll certainly be playing.
The scavenger hunt is indeed up on the Wordplay site this morning, and it is an empty crossword grid with no clues. And nothing else for that matter, nothing to even help find the clues. Anyone who read my post from yesterday, knows the location of at least six clues. Happy hunting!
Update: OK… my browser wasn’t showing the puzzle correctly. There are no down clues, but there are across clues. Also, the sites where the down clues are located are given.
An article has gone up at Movieweb about a crossword scavenger hunt to promote the movie Wordplay. The article directs you to the Wordplay movie site for complete instructions, but notes that complete rules will not be posted until tomorrow. Currently, I can find nothing about this on the Wordplay website. However, there are a couple things that can be deduced from the Movieweb article.
The article has 6 crossword clues in it and suggests that others will be scattered among other sites on the internet. From this, I would guess that a crossword grid with no clues is going up on the Wordplay site tomorrow. Instead, we will get a list of sites where clues can be found, or perhaps hints as to where the clues can be found. I’ll post more tomorrow when the official rules go up.
To promote the upcoming film Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man’s Chest, Volvo is having a treasure hunt competition called “The Hunt.” The goal: find a Volvo XC90 V8 buried somewhere in the world. Oh, but this is not just any Volvo XC90, from the press release:
The buried one-of-a-kind, pirate-themed Volvo XC90 features a variety of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest-inspired elements, including menacing graphics from the film, black leather seats, custom painted 20 inch wheels and more.
The contest begins next Monday and will require a map available from Volvo dealers. There will then bea series of online puzzles to solve leading to the car.
Update: For anyone interested in seeing what this car looks like, visit this site.
Thanks to reader Nancy for pointing out to me that the winners of the Starbucks Ultimate Coffehouse Crossword Competition have been posted on the Starbucks site.
After a short break, I’m back to updating puzzlinks regularly. This week, puzzles will be posted on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday beginning with the regularly scheduled Wordstream puzzle.
This weeks puzzle is baseball themed. And the word list consists of all 30 teams. The puzzle is again too big to display here, so here’s a pdf and the solution.
Back when I wrote my first post on sudoku variations, I mentioned chess variations at the very end. Today I came across someone has written a book called Chessudoku and is publishing it with lulu.
From the sample pages, the book looks promising. The author, Matthew Skala, has come up with a few different variations (and in some cases has written little stories to go with them.) For example, one puzzle requires you to place the digits 1-8 and a chess knight with the added constraint that no two knights can attack each other. There is a similar puzzle with 8 knights and a queen.
The book is selling for $3.50 and contains 351 puzzles which seems very resonable for a sudoku book.
I came across these puzzles over at zotmeister’s blog. He calls them polyominous. The puzzle consists of a grid of dots with numbers sitting between some sets of four dots, not unlike slither link. But the rules, of course, are very different. Each number n sits on a polyomino made up of n cells (e.g. a 4 sits on a polyomino made up of four cells.) No two polyominoes of the same size will be orthagonally adjacent and the entire grid must be filled. To get a better idea, check out the puzzles on zotmeister’s blog.
I found this article from the Monterey County Herald about puzzle designer Lee Krasnow (recently written about on boingboing.) Krasnow has an exhibit opening this week at the Pacific Grove (California) Art Center called “Pursuit of Perfection” that will showcase hardwood geometric interlocking puzzles.
The article is worth reading because Krasnow is an interesting person who can speak very eloquently about puzzles. From the article:
“My inspiration as an artist,” he said, “comes from the limitless complexity and beauty of mathematics that I see in the world around me. I strive to produce my artwork with as little flaw as possible because the closer it comes to geometric perfection, the more beautiful it is to look upon, and the more pleasing it is to hold and manipulate.
“My ultimate goal is to create things which beg to be played with — mechanisms which look simple enough yet hide complexity that is mysterious and fascinating.”
For those of us who live no where near this exhibit, we can see pictures of Krasnow’s work on his website: www.pacificpuzzleworks.com
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