@Alconja Another very nice puzzle. There are a lot of good puzzles around here, though many of them I've got no way to begin on, or they require some leap of intuition from the start. But this one was fun and it was like lighting up my whole neural net at once, keeping track of relationships, relative definitions, etc. Thanks!
As always (for me) the most important criterion is: fun. Couldn't put that one down once I got started. Deliberately didn't check if other answers had been posted so I wouldn't ruin it.
I keep a secret close to my writer
Implication is the key
Go forth to thee and once fifth.
I am the root of a(n)
My sides are
I have no
But in purple
My equation is
What am I?
A hatchback, a limousine, a pickup, a roadster, a sedan, and a van need service through the week - Monday through Saturday - one vehicle per day.
At least one of the vehicles is serviced later in the week than the
hatchback.
The roadster is serviced later in the week than the van and earlier
i...
I ... I was doing some things ... and then somehow I seen something online ... I don't remember actually where. It went like this:
A1: Just recovered from coma. I failed to enter the door, or follow simple instructions.
A2: I entered it, thanks to your failed attempts. Anway, thanks for ma...
Here is a square filled with numbers and holes.
The square is divided in multiple invisible areas which all have their own specific logical sequence.
Although every numbers in an area is found with the same logic, the numbers used to find the next number can come from another area.
Ca...
..yeah, I noticed it, but didn't bother answering. Not sure it's really a puzzle (unless there's another layer to it). Seems to be more of a "do you get these references/in jokes?"... i.e. if you answer yes, then you're guaranteed to "solve" it, but if you answer no, you're guaranteed to not get it.
user189275
@Alconja Haha. You're right, but the jokes are little funny too.
Yeah, I'm not really sure I like it either. It's funny, but seems to be more "trivia" than "puzzle" - the only difference is that it's trivia about puzzlers.
On a Chessboard, place as many chessmen pieces as you can.
Position the center of piece base on center of square.
Avoid any 4 pieces to form a square.
How many pieces do you need?
@Sphinx (Yeah, I know you're a bot) Please stop cluttering the chat place by putting up any questions here + questions in meta + any bounties. It's nonsense.
@ArbitraryKangaroo I've dropped the mechanical one for now, since I missed the fortnight. And I'm still working on the metapuzzle - I've just been really busy recently. I haven't even had much time to come in here!
I have a super old fashioned step counter that looks something like this:
Every time you press the button, the right hand digit increments. When this digit reaches 9 then it resets to 0 and the digit in the 10's box increments and so on. The maximum number of steps that this device can count i...
@ArbitraryKangaroo You can block users by clicking on their name/image in chat, and then click the last option "ignore this user everywhere)" in the section "Actions".
Begin with a flagrantly erroneous sum
and a woefully vacant substitution table.
234
+ 5 Digit 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
------- Substitute digit _ _ _ _ _ _ _
5678
How can the substitution...
I think your puzzle is not "almost too easy" for me :P Sadly just adding the substitute for 5 to every digit above with ignoring remainder works for too many combinations :/ For example 975+1=1086. That's the first thing I thought (considering the lateral-thinking tag)
Or are we only allowed to use 2-8 for the substitues?
Does someone here know why random pastebins always get so much views? Are there people lurking all the time waiting until someone publishes a top secret file or what?
@humn When using the intended method, is there certainly only one unique solution for your question?
Oh ok, I was talking about a unique substitution table. I mean that only with that particular table the summation (or whatever it is in the end) will work. This would obviously be a huge hint if you'd tell me, but if there are many combinations for the table it might be too broad IMHO.
Because that would mean my proposed solution would also be a valid answer, even though it has a ton of table combos
My fault, I can't really explain it... For my example 975+1=1086: 9+1=10, 7+1=8, 5+1=6. Now append all results like a string to eachother, i.e. 1086. This works for 20 combinations.
Got it, like distibuting addition the way multiplication distributes.
A lateral-thinking tag comes with extra responsibility to include guardrails as well as guidelines, i guess, but it sure does get some free ideas for future puzzles!
(oh, Alconja, sorry about that mercurial comment at your swag message, if it lasted long enough to notify you. Got all excited by what looked like a computer much too modern for 8-inch floppies.)
@LukasRotter I think it's because they naturally invite (easy and early) partial answers, which makes them much more likely to hit the HNQ, which gets more eyeballs.
@Sid Hello, I don't have much time at the moment, but I still come on PSE daily :-) (in order to get the Fanatic badge, y'know!) hopefully I'll be back in a couple of weeks!
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 Vexed Word™.
Use the following examples below to find the rule.
$$\begin{array}{|c|c|}\hline
\bbox[yellow]{\textbf{Vexe...
@Sconibulus I think it means "only one is required" rather than "there are no others that could give the stated output" and in fairness I'm pretty sure the intended one is about as simple as they get.
@Alenanno Not necessarily; e.g. as the announcement says [rebus] + [no-computers] would be a unique combination but only because no one has bothered to include [no-computers] on their rebuses before.
Based on the example I was asked to find the way how the puzzle is solved. Here are the examples:
Input:"a" , Output:97
Input:"cdefg", Output:99
Input:"abcdef", Output:199
Input:"Challenges: you solve more difficult programming problems and try to get the shortest solution.", Output:1705
My q...
oh. Nah, that one gets closed as "too broad" because there are lots of possible reasons. Maybe it only runs once every half hour or something. Maybe it runs on a machine that's sometimes busy, and only does its thing in gaps between activity. Maybe it's getting its data from some central server and that only checks things occasionally. Maybe the slowness is actually a sum of multiple latencies -- lots of steps between puzzle posting and Sphinx posting, each of which adds a couple of mins. Etc.
For this puzzle, you're given a three piece set as depicted below:
A blue indicator peg
A square 4 x 4 tile frame filled with 16 tiles
A max.8 tile holder / dispenser
Your task is to un-scramble the tiles in the 4x4 frame to form a well-known pictogram.
There are of course a couple of ...
It's me, Hannah again.
My friend and I have decided to make a online game site.
We've made an account system, registration system, forums, etc.
But random people when signing up get Admin or other Random roles on our forum.
Why is this happening, and what roles did the examples get?
Examples:
...
My weird friend is back. He asked me to guess a number. Then instead of waiting for me to guess like a normal person, he handed me a piece of paper with this written on it:
You thought this clue was the toughest one.
(Not by a long shot.)
But this riddle isn't even half done.
(Nope, def...
If Ryan27 has the right answer, then wow, that's clever. +1. — Deusovi ♦3 hours ago
I was surprised that Sum other numbers got a positive reception at all, after the 1/3-negative response to Truth in numbers, which seems like a more interesting version of the same twist.
I think lateral thinking puzzles work best when they seem impossible at first, but questioning your assumptions makes them somehow work
In truth in numbers, the puzzle was extremely ard to understand ("a specific value" was not clever, just ambiguous), and had one obvious solution (change one to zero)
Can anyone explain to me why this happens -- puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/37031/… is reporting as active today but actually looking at the page, there's no activity. Is this something that got added and then deleted, so nobody but the elite can actually see it, but that still leaves the page marked active? Or is there something else more sinister happening here?! Dun dun dunnnn
@humn also, with truth in numbers, the solution required messing with something seemingly "outside" the problem statement, which feels more like a "cheap trick", whereas sum of numbers remains self contained and just requires a different perspective of the problem statement.
@Rubio someone posted an answer and then deleted it
Anyone know a good website/dictionary for checking syllables in English? I found that the division is rather unexpected at times, so I'd like something reliable to check. :D
@humn Well, it does it sometimes, but it's still annoying. There's no reason to do it. I mean, why hide the information I need the most and that your site is exactly designed to do?
I keep a secret close to my writer
Implication is the key
Go forth to thee and once fifth.
I am the root of a(n)
My sides are
I have no
But in purple
My equation is
What am I?
A hatchback, a limousine, a pickup, a roadster, a sedan, and a van need service through the week - Monday through Saturday - one vehicle per day.
At least one of the vehicles is serviced later in the week than the
hatchback.
The roadster is serviced later in the week than the van and earlier
i...
I ... I was doing some things ... and then somehow I seen something online ... I don't remember actually where. It went like this:
A1: Just recovered from coma. I failed to enter the door, or follow simple instructions.
A2: I entered it, thanks to your failed attempts. Anway, thanks for ma...
Here is a square filled with numbers and holes.
The square is divided in multiple invisible areas which all have their own specific logical sequence.
Although every numbers in an area is found with the same logic, the numbers used to find the next number can come from another area.
Ca...
On a Chessboard, place as many chessmen pieces as you can.
Position the center of piece base on center of square.
Avoid any 4 pieces to form a square.
How many pieces do you need?
I have a super old fashioned step counter that looks something like this:
Every time you press the button, the right hand digit increments. When this digit reaches 9 then it resets to 0 and the digit in the 10's box increments and so on. The maximum number of steps that this device can count i...
Begin with a flagrantly erroneous sum
and a woefully vacant substitution table.
234
+ 5 Digit 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
------- Substitute digit _ _ _ _ _ _ _
5678
How can the substitution...
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 Vexed Word™.
Use the following examples below to find the rule.
$$\begin{array}{|c|c|}\hline
\bbox[yellow]{\textbf{Vexe...
Based on the example I was asked to find the way how the puzzle is solved. Here are the examples:
Input:"a" , Output:97
Input:"cdefg", Output:99
Input:"abcdef", Output:199
Input:"Challenges: you solve more difficult programming problems and try to get the shortest solution.", Output:1705
My q...
For this puzzle, you're given a three piece set as depicted below:
A blue indicator peg
A square 4 x 4 tile frame filled with 16 tiles
A max.8 tile holder / dispenser
Your task is to un-scramble the tiles in the 4x4 frame to form a well-known pictogram.
There are of course a couple of ...
It's me, Hannah again.
My friend and I have decided to make a online game site.
We've made an account system, registration system, forums, etc.
But random people when signing up get Admin or other Random roles on our forum.
Why is this happening, and what roles did the examples get?
Examples:
...
My weird friend is back. He asked me to guess a number. Then instead of waiting for me to guess like a normal person, he handed me a piece of paper with this written on it:
You thought this clue was the toughest one.
(Not by a long shot.)
But this riddle isn't even half done.
(Nope, def...
