The Sphinx's Lair

Maria Deleva

6:00 PM

@LukasRotter I think you might be right. Especially, given the name chosen by the author.

ABcDexter

Look, we got a new one... i mean a new TM

3

Q: What is a Devilish Phrase™/Word™?

This is in the spirit of the What is a Word/Phrase™ series started by JLee with a special brand of Phrase™ and Word™ puzzles. If a word conforms to a special rule, I call it a Devilish Phrase™/Word™. Use the following examples below to find the rule. And, if you want to analyze, here is a CS...

Rand al'Thor

@LukasRotter Lukas Rotten Words?

Maria Deleva

@ABcDexter that's mine :)

ABcDexter

@MariaDeleva Whoa, great. I thought it was someone with a MD :P

Maria Deleva

hahaha :) And it was solved quicker than I thought :)

Lukas Rotter

6:03 PM

@Randal'Thor That can't be a coincidence... I always knew I was born to be a cryptographer, and ROT-13 is my favourite cipher, since it's very secure.

Sconibulus

Hmm... should I go back and edit the TM into Explain Words?

Maria Deleva

And again, my assumptions were correct - a harder for me puzzle was solved quicker than the other one I deem easy :)

I guess my understanding of easy/hard is distorted

Sconibulus

I would probably have never gotten Devilish

Maria Deleva

Me neither (if someone else have posted it)

Sid

@MariaDeleva Wasn't the 666 part used in one of your older puzzles?? I think, it was that Drawing one...

Rand al'Thor

6:08 PM

Wow, nice one @Maria and @MOehm!

Lukas Rotter

See this, I already see the bounty on my bandit words coming... I also thought I totally gave it away with the "Bandit"-

Rand al'Thor

@MariaDeleva That's very hard to judge though :-)

Maria Deleva

@Sid it was :)

ABcDexter

@LukasRotter i still need to learn about bounties O:)

M Oehm

@MariaDeleva: I wouldn't have gotten it if I hadn't been reminded of the calculator puzzle. So that angle was the first one I tried and it worked. I was just lucky, I guess.

Now if I could get anything useful from the loneliness of words or them pesky sea snails ...

Maria Deleva

6:19 PM

@MOehm if you do get the sea snails, I'd ask a moderator to reverse the CW. :)

Rosie F

@MariaDeleva I love some of the devilish phrases among your Devilish Phrases, Maria!

Maria Deleva

And I didn't even know of the calculator puzzle which took practically a year to solve

thanks @RosieF

M Oehm

CW?

Maria Deleva

Community Wiki

M Oehm

Oh, of course. Just mentioning sea snails addles my brain.

Maria Deleva

6:22 PM

And how is the backwards process going? Any ideas on the connection of the words?

M Oehm

No. I can't make anything (except the steaks, of course) either.

Maria Deleva

Wow, I will probably pass the 2k mark today :)

@MOehm I actually just now tried putting all the words in google - nothing useful

M Oehm

Well, it could also be something like an anagram of all initial letters so something like that. But that direction doesn't lead me anywhere.

Puzzling Meta

0

Q: What purpose does the header serve in certain puzzles?

This is a header in the beginning of a puzzle. It could contain valuable information. I see that there is currently a massive retagging is going on (with all its side-effects) due to a recent community consensus on giving a unique tag [word-property] to certain questions. I am in favor of this i...

discussion

Sid

It could be Green- Green Tea, Green Crops, etc.

Maria Deleva

6:30 PM

@Sid tags are important for the puzzle.

M Oehm

Yes, there's the history tag.

Maria Deleva

@MOehm, strangely, what you haven't solved yet, does have useful results on google.

But still, someone should be able to figure it out with just 6 out of 7 (note: 7 is not a final number)

Sid

It could be the scientific name of some snail..

M Oehm

@MariaDeleva: So I only have to get Google to read my mind.

Maria Deleva

Gareth was on the right path on solving the snails...

M Oehm

6:34 PM

Or it isn't a snail at all, but an anagram of something that means sea: Something OCEAN, for example.

I mean, there is an ocean in "snails produce", but overall there are too many letters.

Maria Deleva

2 days ago, by Gareth McCaughan

The clue looks as if (1) "swirls" should indicate an anagram and (2) "echoless", if it isn't just a source of letters for wordplay, might indicate e.g. that some repeated letters or sounds are to be removed. But I have so far failed to make it actually work.

He did get some things right and some not quite right :)

Sconibulus

Picard-Ocean

The hyphenated last names of the fictional stars of movies that did well in 2002?

I think?

Maria Deleva

I have never heard of such ocean

Sconibulus

Ocean's 11, and Star Trek: somethingorother

probably Insurrection or Nemesis

Maria Deleva

Let's just say Gareth did get my train of thought but not my logic :) So perhaps that is what confused him

Sconibulus

6:41 PM

oh, wait, Ocean's 11 was 2001, and Nemesis flopped...

Maria Deleva

it is not really history

I went back thousands of years :)

or not

:P

M Oehm

Aha, Cleopatra!

Maria Deleva

the answer is not always cleopatra

hahaha

Sconibulus

right, sometimes it's Nefertiti

Beastly Gerbil

immediate thought for ancient history clue -CLEOPATRA!

Sconibulus

6:47 PM

@PuzzlingMeta I vehemently disagree, because it makes the puzzle I made not one day ago much more difficult

but also because I believe a header should be allowed to contain whatever it wants, it's as much a part of the puzzle as any other part of it.

(these would likely be comments, but my javascript's still broken, and so commenting and voting requires me to use my phone, which is much more effort)

Maria Deleva

Yes, and I also believe that attribution to the author of these puzzles is a good thing - regardless if he is currently active or not.

M Oehm

I also thought that echoless could mean "without e", since Echo is the alphabet code for E.

Maria Deleva

@MOehm actually it is not really necessary to omit letters, but you would just end up with a longer version (i.e. plural)

So whether it is 6,5 6,6 or 6,7 - they are all valid options

And will help you figuring out the final answer :) Which is not Cleopatra or Nefertiti - they are not old enough :P

Maria Deleva

7:26 PM

I actually like the discussions the Lonely puzzle provoked - it did make me laugh - from the rectangular friends to the kissing part :-D

Sconibulus

nytimes.com/2016/09/22/science/ancient-sea-scrolls-bible.html

only vaguely puzzle related, but really cool

Maria Deleva

true

thanks for sharing :)

Sconibulus

I wonder if the principles behind the 3d to 2d translation could be used for a 2d to 1d translation as a cipher

M Oehm

7:53 PM

I'm not going to find any historical secrets today. Good night!

Maria Deleva

Good night @MOehm :)

Gareth McCaughan

So who got deleted about an hour ago?

Maria Deleva

I have no idea.

You lost rep?

Beastly Gerbil

Well done @Gareth by the way

Rosie F

@MariaDeleva I did, but only 10.

Gareth McCaughan

8:08 PM

I lost 10 too.

Maria Deleva

Well, you won more from Beastly's puzzle :)

Beastly Gerbil

And I only got 2 upvotes :/

:P

Maria Deleva

@BeastlyGerbil 1 is from me :)

Beastly Gerbil

I suppose the puzzle itself was pretty easy, but getting the answer is the tough part

Maria Deleva

You should get more tomorrow :)

Beastly Gerbil

8:09 PM

@MariaDeleva, thanks :P

Everyones asleep now

Maria Deleva

:) I guess they are :)

Gareth McCaughan

8:21 PM

Yeah, today's been a good one for me rep-wise even with the -10 from the Mysteriously Deleted User.

Beastly Gerbil

I'm still waiting for my next breakthrough, hopefully my casino puzzle

Rosie F

8:51 PM

@BeastlyGerbil I'm not... yet.

GentlePurpleRain

9:04 PM

@RosieF Some of us are in North America...

Maria Deleva

Well, for some the day is over and night starts, for some it's afternoon, and some probably just woke up :)

Anyway, it is past midnight here, so I am thinking of going to sleep

Deusovi

9:42 PM

Just got back from class here.

Gareth McCaughan

10:24 PM

@LukasRotter, I'm afraid I've broken your Bandit Words puzzle by finding a rather simple condition that successfully distinguishes Bandit from non-Bandit in your list but that certainly isn't the one you had in mind.

Lukas Rotter

@GarethMcCaughan Yeah, unfortunately the few words I've managed to gather are pretty similar. I'm probably going to update the word list in a few minutes. Although you're already pretty close to the intended solution, I see. What did you try with the bits?

Gareth McCaughan

let's see. I tried clearing bit 0 in every letter to see if that gave a word; ditto for other single bits. I tried bitwise ANDing adjacent letters to see if I got a (shorter) word. I tried bitwise ANDing adjacent bits in either of the two obvious ways. I tried looking to see if there was some bit set in all the letters of a word (other than bits 5,6 which are always set).

This is all with ASCII values, which is almost equivalent to letter numbers 1..26. I haven't tried anything with letters numbered from 0 to 25, or in EBCDIC, or anything similarly exotic.

Lukas Rotter

10:41 PM

@GarethMcCaughan "I tried bitwise ANDing adjacent bits in either of the two obvious ways" Um... Now I'm genuinely scared... Could you demonstrate how you did that with for example 'wa'

Gareth McCaughan

maybe I did it wrong

hang on while I find the relevant line of code

ok, so this is in Python. First of all I did s = map(ord,'worsts') so now s contains the ASCII codes for the letters in "worsts": [119, 111, 114, 115, 116, 115]. Then I made a little utility function: def j(codes): return ''.join(map(chr,codes)) which turns ASCII back into characters and joins them into a string. So j(s) would be "worsts" again. [... continues]

and then I asked for j(c&(c>>1) for c in s) which gave "3'0101" and for j(c&(c<<1) for c in s) which gave "fNbb"

so for "wa" I'd get 119,97

(note that the operation I'm talking about here operates independently on separate letters)

and then the two ways of ANDing 119 give 51 (not a letter) and 102 (letter f)

because 119 in binary is 01110111 which gives 0110011 and you might choose to regard that either as 00110011 or 01100110

similarly 'a' is 01100001 and ANDing adjacent bits will give you just a single 1, in bit 5 or bit 6 depending on how you do it

if, on the other hand, what you were meaning to ask about was ANDing corresponding bits in adjacent letters (which I also tried, and which I wonder whether you might have meant because you gave a 2-letter example)

then let's actually take "popgun" whose bits are

01110000
01101111
01110000
01100111
01110101
01101110

and note that o and p (letters 15 and 16 in the alphabet) have no bits in common other than bits 5 and 6 that (kinda) indicate lowercase-letter-ness in ASCII, so when you AND them what you actually get is the backtick character

is this making sense?

"wa" would give "a" under this operation, by the way

one version of ANDing adjacent bits I haven't tried: treat these as 5-bit symbols, run them all together, and therefore allow the low bit of one letter to get ANDed with the high bit of another. But I don't think you could have meant that because you said uppercase/lowercase is significant.

Rand al'Thor

Woo, I'm famous:

17

Q: Close-Knit Words

Introduction According to Rand Al'Thor's post in the Puzzling SE, a close-knit word is any word that contains three alphabetically consecutive letters (in any order). Words like education, foghorn and cabaret are all considered close-knit words whereas words like learning, klaxon and perform ar...

code-golf string

Gareth McCaughan

Neat!

Lukas Rotter

11:05 PM

@GarethMcCaughan Yes, I understand how you did it. I think the way you've done it would've actually made more sense, but I thought this way: "once a bit was ANDed with another one, it can't be used anymore". Id est: ANDing 8 bits would result in 4 bits with my algorithm. I hope it's clear how I did it now.

Gareth McCaughan

oh, interesting

(I see you edited some stuff out. I never saw that. I guess that's a good rather than a bad thing.)

but, er, it sounds as if you're telling me more than you should be :-)

anyway, let me go and make an answer out of the answer you've just told me :-)

Lukas Rotter

I think I need some sleep... lol

Gareth McCaughan

(actually, I'm still not quite sure what you did. That would be a good thing since it means I may actually be justified in taking a little credit if I work it out.)

Lukas Rotter

And I remember how I criticised someone a few days ago for posting too much hints in chat... I think being brain-afk 24/7 is my special ability :P

I think I'll just edit it in as hint #2

Gareth McCaughan

oh, I think I know what you must have done (but haven't checked it at all yet)

got it

Lukas Rotter

11:28 PM

@GarethMcCaughan Nicely done! I will get some sleep now in hope that in my next puzzle I will resist the urge of giving too many hints :P Bye!

Gareth McCaughan

good night!

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