By the way, I've noticed that you've been editing out detective from questions. If you want, you can bring it up on meta and we'll get a CM to burninate it. (I agree that it doesn't need to exist, BTW)
I'm sorry, but TheBitByte really needs to put more effort into their logic puzzles before posting them. They've posted three so far, and every one has been insufficiently specified or unsolvable in its initial state and had to undergo multiple revisions, even while answers were coming in, to become properly solvable.
Btw @Deusovi, since someone suggested putting an actual PSE question on the Tour page rather than the unicorn-daisies stuff: could you have a look at the list of possibilities and see how many there are?
Inspired by this other puzzle, tell me a correct way by which adding 22 to 4 will give 82.
As in that other puzzle, these numbers are all expressed in base 10.
I got "x" number of sweets. I can divide my sweets equally by 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 all the way to 101 friends such that I have no left overs. Find the least number of sweets I could possibly have at first?
Note: This logic is a troll, so I thought it is fun. Wanna see how people answer. Anyways, the an...
I have been told that it is possible to guarantee no worse than a tie in normal 3x3 tic-tac-toe, but that the first move is very important. What is that important first move?
The question also has to be fairly short, as do at least two of its answers (preferably highly-voted ones).
@Deusovi Only because the two non-accepted answers don't have any formatting. If you put that one in the Tour, it'd be those low-voted answers that would show up.
Oh, my Puzznk puzzle has been solved, if anyone's interested. @Areeb @Lukas
Do locked questions qualify? If so, it's clunky, but we could create a "dummy" question with answers specifically for the tour (and lock it so no one messes with it)...
There's probably a lower limit on votes for questions and answers on the tour, so it'd have to stay unlocked until it garners enough upvotes - and in that time, people might post spoilertagged answers or edit in quotes or whatever, which would then have to be edited out just as if we used an existing question.
@BenAaronson I don't know how to explain this without giving away part of the actual answer, but Deusovi's answer is incorrect. — TheBitByte24 mins ago
@Deusovi Goodness knows. I've pretty much given up on his last question:
@randal'thor Okay. I'm confused. Could you edit my post to clarify that the 3rd door is the answer? Not give away the answer, just make it so that the answer turns out to be the 3rd door. Apparently I've been trying to do this myself and failing. — TheBitByte20 mins ago
(Monty Hall problems are riddled with convincing fallacies though, so it's possible your answer is wrong even if it seems to be right!)
I know, it's just that if it's about getting the correct solution, then Herb Wolfe got it first. If it's about explaining the working leading to the solution, Herb Wolfe seems to have gotten it wrong. — TheBitByte1 min ago
@Randal'Thor Hey, it's not exactly the same thing! It's slightly different.
@Deusovi Well, personally, I find it interesting. In my opinion, if you're downvoting it because it's too easy, just answer it. If you enjoyed answering it, consider upvoting it instead. — TheBitByte57 secs ago
If you wanted to, you could advise on which answer to accept, having made it clear that it's up to them. But if you don't want to do that (since you're one of the answerers yourself and therefore biased), then why not just let them think aloud in comments and eventually come to a decision?
Though, I personally tend to think one shouldn't both downvote and answer a question. If it's interesting enough to answer, it shouldn't be bad enough to downvote.
@Randal'Thor I disagree, as long as the question's open. You might think it's confusingly worded, but at last understand and find an answer. Or perhaps you think it's ill-posed but you make plausible assumptions and then answer.
I'm sad.
Everyday I can see posts with very low quality or too easy. Others on hold for multple reasons ... and just a few amazing puzzles. I love seeing a good puzzle, which took a lot of work and effort to build. But as they are not easy, there are no answers, there are no views and eventuall...
There is currently a question from the personal finance stack in HNQ, titled:
Getting $10,000 and have $16,000 balance on two credit cards - How to allocate payments?
However, this renders like:
This appears to be a consequence of changing the MathJax delimiter, and odd to see since MathJax...
@Randal'Thor Also, do these 2 parts would count for the fortnightly challenge, or will it be counted as a whole? Although I doubt I'll finish making this puzzle before the 19th...
@IAmInPLS I think the fortnightly challenge counts individual questions, so they'd both be counted separately if they're both posted within the fortnight.
@Sconibulus In my opinion pretty much everything :) "A puzzle that is dressed up as a story or a longer description of a situation. " If I define "longer" as "at least two words", a riddle that starts with "So my friend gave me this note with a riddle on it" could be tagged with story.
I'm so dumb, I checked like 5 times to see if the puzzle matched my notes, or if I'd made any dumb transposition mistakes, but forgot to check if my notes matched reality until after it was posted
I don't think it's extensive, but it's definitely worthy of the tag
well, extensive (or the right wikipedia page) might be needed to fully solve it, but I think you can get far enough to find that page without too much trouble
I mean, there might be the seed of a decent question there, but as is, it's kinda crap, and I understand it being closed
the other one seems way more detailed, has embedded links to the youtube videos in question, and even in the original posting, explained the backstory rather thoroughly, as well as how prior steps had been solved
@Deusovi I'm a little disappointed that the way to get from each step to the next wasn't clearer (i.e. it was a really hard puzzle - there's nothing wrong with that, of course). But there's no doubt that it's always clear once you get each step that it's right, and that's the hallmark of a good multi-part puzzle, because it enables you to keep going and know you're on the right track.
So altogether it's awesome but also really hard :-) @Alconja
@Randal'Thor Yeah, I wasn't 100% happy with this one, which is (partly) why I didn't finish it when I started working on it for the mazes fortnightly... I knew that middle step was significantly harder than the others, but couldn't see how I could improve it given the limited design space of a grid of letters...
@GarethMcCaughan Yeah, that's where I was going wrong already. I was thinking along the lines of replacing some of the letters by numbers, and that there was something special about A,B,D but not C.
@Deusovi I was writing up a meta post just now and then realised it'd be a duplicate of this one :-) Any further news on that? +13/-0 looks like a pretty strong consensus to me.
That is the key to good puzzles, in my opinion: They appear easy, but are not. They appear difficult, but are not. You brush them off as too simple, yet you cannot solve them. You ignore them as too hard, yet you would finish them if you tried.
But I agree it's not obvious... like I said, not 100% happy with it, but it's hard when you're trying to cram letters into a smallish grid with minimal gaps
I think at the end of the day, I'm just annoyed at the inconsistency of difficulty within the puzzle itself. First step is easy, second is very hard, third is easy, fourth is easy... would've like to smooth that curve out a little
Amongst the trees one stands alone,
Through the ages he's aged and grown,
Here to tell all that see,
Of their desperate, despairing plea.
So look at all he's come to be,
And heed the words of the riddle tree.
The poem above is just fluff, all necessary info is in the images.
What is the tree...
@Puzzling—BOUNTY! I find it interesting how there's a bot for bounty questions, but no bot for questions in general. Maybe there is one and I just don't see it.
@TheBitByte There's a meta bot and a bounty bot, but not an all-questions bot. Which, back in the year-and-a-half when this room was almost totally dead, made sense: so many questions being posted in here would have drowned out any occasional tidbit of actual chat. But if this level of chat activity is going to keep up, I'd be in favour of introducing an all-questions bot.
For one thing, it'd mean I could just sit in chat and see when new questions appear without having to keep the front page of the site open in another tab ;-)
@TheBitByte Yeah, so does SFF and many other sites.
@TheBitByte No offence, but maybe it's because people are wary of your questions by now?
Personally, after having attempted two of your logic puzzles and watched how a third went, I gave the new question a miss. In all three of those, you kept having to edit the question because it was unsolvable or insufficiently specified at first, and all the answerers had to scramble editing their answers to try to keep up.
@Randal'Thor Well, very strangely, you say "no offence" and proceed to be potentially offensive. Aside from this remark, I do not find that this is the case, in my opinion. I just think people do not find my question interesting, which in and of itself is an interesting thing, since I personally find the question interesting.
@TheBitByte It's not very strange. That's exactly what the phrase "no offence" is for: to attempt to mitigate a potentially offensive statement in the hope that it won't actually cause offence :-)
@TheBitByte, how else would you suggest someone convey the message "I am about to say something critical that could cause offence, but causing offence isn't my intention and I hope I don't"?
Well, "overused" means used too much, and if it serves a useful function for which there isn't a superior alternative I don't really see how that's the case. (What might be true, and would be a different complaint, is that a lot of the time when it's used the person using it is hoping not actually to avoid giving offence but just to evade responsibility for doing so. FWIW I don't think Rand was doing that here.)
@GarethMcCaughan There's a difference between there not being a superior alternative to a cliché, and the alternative indeed existing while some people choose to not utilize it.