If anyone has ever tied to solve the peg solitaire puzzle, you’ve probably reached a point where you wondered if there really was a solution. Here’s a video that demonstrates how to solve the puzzle.
If anyone has ever tied to solve the peg solitaire puzzle, you’ve probably reached a point where you wondered if there really was a solution. Here’s a video that demonstrates how to solve the puzzle.
Through mathpuzzle.com, I discovered that the Cambridge Univesity Press is releasing a new series of books called The New Martin Gardner Mathematical Library. Over at the Cambridege Press blog, they are giving away some of the books to those who can solve some of Martin Gardner’s famous puzzles.
The blog for the World Puzzle Championship has a post today announcing that there are 49 days left until the competition. The post also features a collection of all of the puzzles used in the Belarusian and Russian Puzzle Championships. These puzzles were constructed by many of the authors who will be contructing the puzzles for the main competition.
Back in April, I put up a post about KenKen puzzles when they first started appearing on the Times Online site. Now Will Shortz is jumping on the KenKen bandwagon and he’s created a short video to introduce the puzzle to America. The puzzle Will does in this video is very simple and uses only addition. Still, it’s clear that some of the harder puzzles that he mentions involve other arithmetic operations.
With Will Shortz behind it, you can expect to start seeing KenKen puzzles in newspapers soon. He’s also planning to realease a few KenKen books in October.
Here’s a quick news tidbit. Next week, the New York Times will feature crossword puzzles constructed by students aged 15-19.
I got an email about a new site called The URL Riddle. It’s one of those sites where each page presents you with a riddle and the answer to the riddle is the next page that you need to go to.
The author is looking for feedback, so post any thoughts on the site here. One thing that I noticed was that on sites like this, players can often feel like they are making no progress. It’s often good to have pages up for answers that players are likely to guess with a short message and maybe another hint. I’ve emailed the author with this suggestion, so maybe we eill see improvements soon.
Smartkit has put together a puzzle book with 79 of the best puzzles from their site. Check it out.
Logic-Puzzles.org is a great new site that is dedicated to logic grid puzzles. These puzzles feature a set of assertions, generally about a group of people and what kind of pets they have, what color hats they wear, etc. The goal is to determine from the limited set of assertions, which pet each person has, etc. There is a grid that accompanies the puzzle that helps you solve it.
Logic-Puzzles.org provides a seemingly unlimited amount of these puzzles and a great interface for playing them. The grid is provided for you and you can fill it out on the site. The site will also keep time, so that you know how long it takes you to solve a puzzle. I would highly recommend checking it out.
There’s a new sudoku variation over at The Griddle called Curve Doku. The puzzle combines a killer sudoku with a greater-than sudoku. It’s called Curve Doku because the two puzzles are connected by curves that also serve as blocks in the sudoku grid.
It’s recently been determined that 22 moves or less are needed to solve any configuration of a Rubik’s Cube. There is more information about this on mathpuzzle.com. (That information comes from here.)
I got an email about a new kind of puzzle called Mozaniac. The puzzle involves assembling pieces to create a picture, but it differs from jigsaw puzzles in a couple ways. The pieces interlock in a way such that they overlap each other. In this way, a single set of pieces can be used for four different puzzles when both the front and back of the pieces are used.
There are a number of puzzles for sale on the site. Some of them feature fine art painting, which the creators not are not terribly difficult, and others require you to assemble pictures of numbers which are the more challenging puzzles. What’s missing from this site is a small Mozaniac puzzle that you can print out and try for yourself.
The tag line for Foldit is “Solve Puzzles for Science.” It’s a protein folding game and the results of the game being played by people around the internet will be used for scientific research. The idea is that a large number of people playing a game can perform some tasks better than computers. Does that really work? From what I can tell, that is the question. The focus of the research right now seems to be proving that this works.
So, how is the game? When you play, you get dropped into protein folding without much introduction. It’s not entirely clear, to start, what the goal is or what your tactics should be. As you play and experiment, the goals become more clear: avoid collisions, create hydrogen bonds, eliminate voids. I also was able to develop a little bit of strategy but the only tools that I seemed to have available were pulling on the protein chain and wiggling the backbone. I’m not entirely sure what I was doing, but I managed to get progressively better scores.
In all, it’s worth a look. And if anyone can explain the game to me a little more, that would be great.
Grand Tour Puzzles involve a grid of points that all need to be connected by a single loop. To begin the puzzle, a few of the points are already connected to insure a unique solution. There is a great resource for Grand Tour puzzles on the web here. Also, for anyone interested in the math behind the puzzle, check out this page. Enjoy!
Vexus Puzzle is a web site that features new and original logic puzzles. There are two puzzle types currently available to try on the site, Navigrid and Isolate. Navigrid is a puzzle that requires you to fill a sequence of numbers into a grid. The trick is that there are only a set number of moves that can be made between two consecutive numbers. These moves are listed below the grid and each can only be used once. Isolate requires you to devide a grid into sections of different sizes which are listed below the grid. Each section must contain exactly two squares with blocks in them and each internal point in the grid must have at least two line segments connected to it.
That’s the two puzzles in a nut shell but, as always, the best way to get a sense of them is to click over and try them out. Enjoy!
I got an email today about a web site dedicated to pentominoes. Currently, the site is running a competition for readers to solve a pentomino sudoku. It is similar to a standard sudoku, but the grid is made up of pentominoes and the numbers in each pentomino sum to 22. Enjoy!
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