The Sphinx's Lair

3:49 AM

constantly refreshing Jafe's page in hope that the newest crossword will pop up

kidding, he will provide at his own time

4:48 AM

won't be until evening my time, i'm afraid!

5:02 AM

yeah it's fine :0

bobble

oAlt, close your mouth! something might fly in!

1 hour later…

6:17 AM

Oops I keep forgetting

There we go

3 hours later…

9:12 AM

-2

Q: Dr Cheryl Pruitt

I am Dr Cheryl Pruitt, What country does this map represent? Please give me a name of this country map

9:41 AM

cryptic's finally up!

geography cryptic-crosswords

10:02 AM

Q: Take nothing but pictures

This is part 6 of the puzzle series that started at Living the traveller's dream. Each part is solvable on its own. ”Take nothing but pictures. Leave nothing but footprints.” – unknown Dear Puzzling, As a world citizen who takes full advantage of the opportunities made available by globalisati...

Q: Chess Construction Challenge #D: 8 moves

10:52 AM

Since I "burnt" the complete question elsewhere, let's start with "D" (I counted up in hex) and 8 moves. The position in the answer there can be improved by far! OK, to recapitulate: Legal position, no promoted material, as many pieces as possible, each piece has 8 legal moves, ties broken by pro...

chess

11:16 AM

ah dangit, gareth's simply much faster hahah

Q: Finally. Took me a while

The answer to this puzzle is a single word.

enigmatic-puzzle visual

hehe

The "Dr Cheryl Pruitt" question above (now deleted) is curious. After a bit of googling, I think what is going on is this. Cheryl Pruitt was a school administrator, who was charged with various sorts of wrongdoings but ultimately cleared of the charges. I reckon she found that searching for her name mostly turned up articles about the accusations, and engaged a reputation-management service, who have attempted to flood the internet with other things to find when you search [... continues]

... for "Cheryl Pruitt". So there's this puzzle here; she's posted on various technical discussion boards (or, more precisely, I reckon a reputation management service's contrators have done so in her name) saying content-free things like "Hi. I'm a former educator and I'm interested in learning about Microsoft products"; there's a post on "Spotify Community" saying "Cheryl Pruitt is my colleague and she says Spotify is the best ..."; etc., etc., etc. All in about the last week.

And I reckon it's all search-engine chaff, designed to make it less likely that searching for her name turns up stuff about crime and scandal; presumably making her look like a prolific spammer is considered better.

It's hard to be too cross about it, since it seems she didn't in fact do the bad things that I'm guessing were previously at the top of all the search results :-).

now i know and i didn't before... streisand effect comes to mind

identification-request history-of-literature textual-history physical-books book-collecting

11:58 AM

yup!

of course I'm only guessing -- the truth might be something entirely different. But I'd be pretty surprised if I were wrong.

of course another possibility is that there's some new scandal they're hoping to submerge :-).

of course I say "of course" too much

Mithical

in The Reading Room, 4 hours ago, by Bookworm

Q: Dr Cheryl Pruitt

I am Dr Cheryl Pruitt and i have a degree in Literature and want to know what is the purpose of this website. Meaning of “curving afternoons” and “the idea of destination meant almost as little to him as…”

12:30 PM

Yeah, it seems like a pretty high-intensity campaign.

I bet they've hit other Stack Exchange sites too.

Too bad the user who posted the Puzzling one has been destroyed so I can't use the Super Secret Mod Toolz to try to find out where they're operating from. Though I suspect most of the actual work is farmed out to Mechanical Turkers or something of the sort.

1:07 PM

@Jafe I was only able to get 26A and 6/19D myself

I love Japanese-style logic puzzles, though, and I would do better on University Challenge than on Countdown

Anonymus 25

@ParclyTaxel Oh really? What is your favorite Nikoli genre?

Slitherlink

Anonymus 25

I meant oooh

Autocorrect

I hate autocorrect

I like Fillomino

Much of that love was cultivated on Simon Tatham's collection

Anonymus 25

Ooh, Simon. I like his Flood puzzles.

1:21 PM

For one of my university modules I was asked to make a Sudoku solver in Prolog

That... is a standard exercise in CLPFD/CLPZ and the relational calculus

You say that as if "University asks its students to do a fairly standard exercise" is some sort of surprise.

1:47 PM

It is not a surprise indeed. I tend to write as I think, on the fly, somewhat like stream of consciousness