The Wall Street Journal blog, The Wallet, has a little video that shows us what’s in the wallet of famous puzzlers Will Shortz and Maki Kaji. Who knew that Will Shortz played table tennis? Maki Kaji’s wallet is filled with bar receipts and horse racing tickets. I kid you not.
Wei-Hwa Huang won the second US Sudoku Championship this weekend beating reigning champ Tom Snyder by 26 seconds. There is a nice little video that goes along with the Philadelphia Inquirer article in which a modest Wei-Hwa Huang says severa times that he does not expect to win.
There is a new puzzle up at Smartkit called Untouchable that was written by Peter Grabarchuk. The goal is to arrange a group of hexominoes in a grid so that they don’t touch. Smartkit is giving away prizes for those who can solve the puzzle first.
There was a post on Passion for Puzzles recently about CrosScan puzzles. CrosScan puzzles are billed as a combination of crossword puzzles and word search puzzle. What this means is that the puzzle is essentially a word search puzzle but instead of a list of words, you are giving a list of clues to decipher. You then need to find the word in the word search grid.
I have a couple thoughts on this puzzle type. First, it may be harder than a crossoword because the answers to clues don’t really help you at all for the others. The clues generally form a theme, but that’s about all you get. You don’t get letter clues. My second thought is that it seems like it’s possible to find the wrong answer. I may get the wrong answer for the clue, but as long as I can find the right letters in the grid, I’ll never know it was a wrong answer. I think there needs to be some kind of final answer, like a word made up of unused letters. That could help solve the problem.
I got an email from Leonid Mochalov, a Russian puzzle inventor. He was drawing my attention to his web site which features many original puzzles, some of which are very unique.
The puzzle types on his page include Squarewords, a sudoku like puzzle involving words, and Express-Labyrinth, a maze-like puzzle that requires you to visit every square in a grid. The site also shows us a number of Mochalov’s block puzzles including a “Chess Cube” that you can print out and try to construct for yourself.
I found a blog post entitled “The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever” and, naturally, it piqued my interest. The post points to a Wikipedia entry of the same name. Apparently, there is a puzzle commonly know as “The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever” and it is attributed to Raymond Smullyan and John McCarthy.
It’s a kind of puzzle that most will be familiar with. The puzzler is presented with three gods. One that always lies, one that always tells the truth, and one that sometimes lies and sometimes tells the truth. Your task is to come up with three questions that will help you determine the identity of each god. The additional trick is that the gods speak their own language and you have to decipher that as well.
The solution to the puzzle is on the wikipedia page, so don’t read it all if you want to figure it out for yourself.
A recent commenter posted on a new puzzle type called Suduro, billed as a Sudoku/Kakuro combo. Readers of this blog should find Suduro familiar. It is identical to my Circle Sum Sudoku puzzle.
On Blaine’s Puzzle Blog there was a sudoku variation called a mini-sudoku posted recently. When I first heard the title, I thought it was just a sudoku puzzle with a smaller grid, but it’s more clever than that. The puzzle is a 3X3 grid, one of the inner squares in a sudoku puzzle. This means that the squares in the grid need to be filled with the digits 1-9. The only clues that you have is the sum of the digits in L-shaped sections around the outside of the grid.
I didn’t catch this one when it first came up because of the name. But it’s worth a closer look.
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