The writer over at the Gridless blog has written me to let me know that a modification of the Kevin Bacon puzzles can be found there also. On Gridless, they’re called Ouisa’s Ladder.
The writer over at the Gridless blog has written me to let me know that a modification of the Kevin Bacon puzzles can be found there also. On Gridless, they’re called Ouisa’s Ladder.
I read a lot of blogs about puzzles and I’m thinking of making a quick roundup of the blogs a regular feature. I’ll not be mentioning all of the blogs I read here but if you have a blog that’s not listed here, drop me a line and I’ll add it to the list.
A long time reader has written to tell me about his new blog titled: Bozzball’s Puzzling World. The intention of the blog is to have a regular daily puzzle of different variety. Currently, there are quite few sudoku puzzles and a domino puzzle available on the site. For any who are interested in seeing additional requests, Bozball appears to be taking requests.
I have a thing for puzzles based on games where knowledge of the rules of the game help you to solve the puzzle. I’ve been trying for a while to come up with a good puzzle based on Texas Holdem Poker. (For Texas Holdem neophytes, instructions for the game can be found at the previous link.) The idea that kept coming to my mind was the climactic poker scene in Casino Royale when James Bond wins all of the chips. There are four or five players left at the time and they all have cards that make up good hands with the common cards, and still they are all hands of very different values. I wondered if you could figure out what the four common cards were if you were shown each players individual cards and given the final rankings. As a proof of concept I came up with the puzzle below. There are six hands. Hand 1 ranks highest with the common cards and hand 6 ranks lowest. The object is to determine the common cards.
I this puzzle is fairly easy and, of course, the idea would be to provide as little information as possible and still have a unique solution. I’m not sure yet if really challenging puzzles can be made, but I think there is potential here.
Oh yeah, and here’s the answer.
There’s a great article on the MIT Mystery Hunt in a local Cambridge Newspaper which is currently in progress. The article does a good job of explaining what a puzzle hunt is for the uninitiated. There’s a brief summary of the history of the MIT Mystery Hunt along with descriptions of a few of the puzzles. We’re told that these puzzles, including one written in an archaic Minoan language, were too easy. We also get a taste of the kinds of puzzles that have made it into recent hunts. What’s interesting is that every year the winning team has to create the hunt the following year. This leads to very different styles of puzzles showing up in the hunt. The article points out the difference between puzzles that attempt to confuse you by providing too little information and those that attempt to confuse you by providing too much. It’s a fun read.
There’s a story in the Yemen Observer about a Yemeni man who may have broken the record for the world’s largest crossword puzzle. Abdul-Karim Qasem has created a crossword puzzle that has 320,500 squares and an 800,720 word clue book. The puzzle took him seven years to complete and he needed to spend two days in bed after finishing it.
This story is an early favorite for strangest puzzle-related news article of the year. (a category where there’s not much competition.) Qasem claims that the previous record belonged to Tunisian man who had created a puzzle with 1800 squares. This is not true. The record setting puzzle that I know of has over 91,000 squares. Still, Qasem’s puzzle shatters that record fairly handily. Also, Qasem apparently used burn medication in his pens instead of ink when he was creating the puzzle. I was unable to determine the reason from the article.
The new record has not yet been confirmed by Guiness. Presumably when that happens, we’ll hear more about it from other international news sources.
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