A few easy-ish cryptic-clues for anyone who chances to notice:
An arbitrator is hidden inside Trump - I respect that (6) What do you want here on Stack Exchange, Republican leaders? (3) The point is, primarily Donald Trump has nothing (3) Smart leaders of America support Trump? Uh, that's extraordinary (6)
The one I have is similar, but probably not enough so that I can use it's solution to solve this one. Depends on whether those notches get in the way (talking about the notched inside the rings not the holes on the edges).
I think you can first place O, then a G around it, then a G through it. Then my visualization gets a little rough, but I think you can put the narrow C through, the wide C next to the O, and the E around it?
All: I was going to remove the tag mechanical-puzzles from this puzzle because it doesn't apply, but then I realized it's there because of the fortnight. Thoughts?
Ane is a very smart kid.
She has 9 number blocks [1] to [9], and 2 operation block [+] and [x].
Today She is playing with her blocks.
She is so happy after arranging her blocks,
then perform the math operation, the result is 100000.
She even can create 2 operations.
[4][8][x][5][6][+][9][7][3][...
The blocks are getting moved though.. but that is too weak of an argument to have the mechanical puzzle tag considering there is no mechanism to it....
This is more like a 6th or 7th grade maths problem..
@dcfyj I didn't VTC because I thought the poster knew how to solve it. I VTC because I think it's a schoolbook mathematics question rather than a puzzle.
@Ankoganit Yeah, that, or get to be the first to answer some easy rebuses. I've earnt 200 rep quicker and easier that way than by actually making puzzles.
@dcfyj It looks nice, but it's actually a bit too time-consuming (at least for lazy people like me :P). It took me some time just to get the instructions.
@dcfyj I didn't even try it because the length of it was too overwhelming too me :D I tend to not participate in puzzles where community answers are anyway. I upvoted because of the effort it must've took, though. (and no, that's not meant in a bad way)
@Ankoganit I don't know whether SOSTHINK does work, but the reasons why I think it's likely are the ones already given by someone else in another answer (SOS + THIN K). I haven't figured out anything to do with it, if that's what you mean.
@dcfyj I don't know about anyone else, but your most recent puzzle looks difficult to "get into". Even the community-wiki answer thing is kinda hard to make sense of. This isn't, for the avoidance of doubt, a problem with it, but it probably explains why it's getting less attention than you'd like: someone will only attack it if they have a reasonable-sized chunk of time to devote to it.
You don't really need to memorize all the trig formulae. E.g., if you know the ones like cos(A+B)=... then you can deduce the ones like cos(A)+cos(B)=...; and if you know a bit about complex numbers then the ones like cos(A+B)=... are really just real and imaginary parts of products of complex numbers and their conjugates.
(Because if you write x=cos(theta) and y=sin(theta) then multiplying by x+iy = rotating anticlockwise by theta and multiplying by x-iy = rotating clockwise by theta, so e.g. cos(A+B) = real part of (x+iy)(p+iq) = xp-yq = cos(A)cos(B)-sin(A)sin(B).)
@Ankoganit Number theory and combinatorics have lots of beautiful things that can be appreciated without years of immersion. Complex analysis is fantastically useful and has lots of lovely things accessible at undergraduate level. I've always been partial to "foundations" -- set theory, logic, model theory, all that sort of stuff -- but many people find it impossibly dry.
One area that combines a lot of these and that I think is particularly beautiful (though it seems disappointingly short of applications elsewhere in mathematics) is the body of theory developed mostly by J H Conway that unifies numbers with (one kind of) games.
(Warning: "game theory" means at least two VERY DIFFERENT things in mathematics. One is the Conway stuff I mentioned above. Another is associated with von Neumann and others and is closer to economics. Both are kinda cool but in very different ways.)
@GarethMcCaughan Yes, I like that theory, too -- what of it I can understand! I like it that some 2-player games with simple rules can have very complicated strategies.
@Ankoganit Linear algebra is really boring (to me, anyway) but incredibly useful throughout mathematics (both pure and applied). Real analysis I always rather liked, but my tastes may be odd.
(The thing with both is to get good enough at them that you no longer have to think about them. This may take a while.)
Yes, Winning Ways is lovely. I lent my copy to someone who never gave it back (and I was never able to remember who it was) so I ended up buying the 4-volume version. I'm kinda nostalgic for the 2-volume version :-).
@Ankoganit Sure, it makes sense to me now. (If you transposed at first, then it wouldn't be associative.) But it was definitely weird at first, especially since matrices' numbering convention is different from that of graphs.
@JonathanAllan Or "retrograde analysis" as it is sometimes called by those who build tabebases of game positions. (To the possible confusion of those who study retrograde analysis problems.)
@Ankoganit Nah. "matrix represents a linear map between two vector spaces. Writing it in the form of an {m \times n} matrix...". As he says. A matrix represents a linear map. A matrix isn't the same thing as a linear map. Just as a sequence of coordinates represents a point, but isn't the same thing.
@Ankoganit He's ranting about teaching linear maps in terms of matrices. So, there might be better ways to teach linear algebra. Fine. But that doesn't mean that the one and only use of matrices is representing linear maps.
The problem here is, all the puzzles are solved in a jiffy... and the only ones left are some riddles in which getting the correct answer is like a lottery...
@GarethMcCaughan Not only that, but even if every individual word in a question is correctly spelt but the question is unclear, and you think of one possible thing the OP could have been trying to say, it mightn't be the only thing. If the OP is re-telling a puzzle you know, fine, but if it's an original puzzle you might have to desist from correcting even though you know the OP needs correcting.
I can't actually find it, but there was a problem where there was a series of numbers that was either the sum or product of the nth primes, where n was any set of natural numbers that summed to x. There were gaps in the sequence, and some sort of riddle cluing it. I also think it had a mistake or three that the author denied when asked about in the comments
Is it possible to have not only a range of cells to check (for a count for example), but also a range of criteria? Otherwise, I'm forced to repeat the formula for n times and it gets... messy and tedious.
Like if I want to count the instances of the letters A to Z in a row, I don't want to have to use =COUNTIF for 26 times.
Ideally, I'm looking for something like =COUNTIF(A1:Z1,A:Z), or similar.
@Alenanno Do you have enough cells to spare to put the count of A's in one cell, ...., the count of Z's in a 26th cell, and their sum or whatever in another cell?
@RosieF Well, after the table is over, I have infinite columns, but I was hoping to get it done in one column, with a single formula/command (if I understood what you mean).
To be honest, I was trying to do this because it seemed less complicated, but maybe I can ask you guys for the original thing I needed (which might be simpler). Basically I have a medium-sized table. What I want to do is, for each cell, check if there are duplicates in its current row/column and let me know where they are, even a simple red background will do.
I managed to do it for one row, but I was wondering if I could apply this to the whole table without having to redo the command for each col/row.
I thought that the countif could solve my problems by counting the instances of dupes, but it seems it's going to be harder lol
Yes the conditional formatting works, but either it works in one row (A1:Z1), and I need to redo the process for each row and column, or I apply it to the whole table, resulting in it thinking that all cells are duplicates instead of "this row and this column".
This is a macro I wrote to hide rows base on a value in the row, I'm sure you could adapt it to your liking: Private Sub Worksheet_Change(ByVal Target As Range) Application.ScreenUpdating = False Sheets("Sheet1").Protect Password:="spider", UserInterFaceOnly:=True ' Dim R As Range ' Set R = Application.Intersect(Target, Range("A1:A10")) ' If R Is Nothing Then Exit Sub With ActiveSheet For Each Cell In Range("B8:B38") If CInt(Cell.Value) > CInt(Cells(5, 8).Value) Then Cell.EntireRow.Hidden = True
Basically, you could make a giant Ken-Ken type thing, maybe 26x26, with certain squares highlighted that are part of the solution. Excel could have formats to check and highlight mistakes and dupes on Sums, Products, Differences, etc. (Otherwise such a big grid is probably impossible)
then the highlighted numbers could form a password or something
it'd be a good use of computer-puzzle I think, and there aren't that many of those
(Ken-Ken is what it's called on nytimes.com, I haven't actually seen it anywhere else, but it's a simple enough idea to probably have dozens of names)
@Alenanno so suppose your numbers are in A1..E10. You can put =COUNTIF($A1:$E1,A1) in G1 and copy that over the range G1..K10; values >1 indicate duplicates within a row. Do the same with =COUNTIF(A$1:A$10) and values >1 indicate duplicates within a column. You can put 'em together: put =COUNTIF($A1:$E1,A1)+COUNTIF(A$1:A$10,A1)=2 and then you'll get false entries when either the row or column has a dupe.
(I tried this in Excel; don't know whether other Excel-like spreadsheets will do the same but would expect so for OpenOffice/LibreOffice.)
I forget just how general conditional formatting is; perhaps you can use essentially the same formulae I proposed putting in different cells in a conditional format.
yup. If you're filling that in over a block of the spreadsheet you need some dollar signs so that the range doesn't shift. Maybe conditional-formatting formulae work differently.
If you want to highlight all duplicates (not skipping over first occurrence) put $ signs in front of the range letter on the rows one and in front of the range number on the columns one
Conditional does shift over, but it does it in a loop like way
I don't know if @Alenanno is paying attention or if he's noticed I found the forumlas he wanted :P
basically, =COUNTIF($A1:$F1,A1)>1 loops through each cell in the range, say A1;F10, only changing the row number when comparing and the row/column for the cell it's comparing to
And the other formula does the same thing but changing the column instead of the row
Putting the $ sign in front of each piece "locks" that piece in place so it can't change.
Nope, just go to conditional formating and put those 2 equations, no more no less
In the applies to box put whatever the range you're checking against is.
You'll also have to put what kind of formatting you want of course, but it's rather minor work to do compared to doing each row and each column individually
Mine's so outdated I doubt I could used it lol, I took the certification test back in 2005 or so
@MOehm Like I was saying earlier (not sure if this is before you came in or not) the $ signs just "lock" that particular piece in place, nothing more really
so $A1 lock the columns not the rows, $A$1 locks both, A$1 locks the rows, and A1 lock nothing
And then there's the issue of licalisation. Everyone in the world uses sqrt as the function name for the square root and so does Excel, but we have a German-language installation of couirse, so it's the Wurzel(x). Gah! That's even inaccurate, it shoulöd be the Quadratwurzel to get the maximum out of German verbosity.
The only time you need them is if you're dragging functions across cells (to copy them) or in more complicated functions for conditional formatting where you need it to loop a certain way.
Yes, but why can't they let us use sqrt and all the other more or less canonical function names? In the underlying XML the functions show up in English.
It's cool that we can use MathJax to do nice stuff like:
$$\{0+ai,0-ai^\frac{2}3,0+\frac{i}a,0-\frac{i}a\}\forall a \in A \subseteq \Bbb{R}$$
(stolen from this Jonathan Allan answer)
or this:
$$\sum_{i=0}^n i^2 = \frac{(n^2+n)(2n+1)}{6}$$
(stolen from this Mathematics Meta answer).
But we...
In the home tab of the ribbon go to conditional formatting and go down to manage rules. Click new rule and go down to use formula (or something like that, it's the bottom one). In the textbox paste one of the formulas (make sure you change the range on them to the values you need), change the format to whatever you like and click OK. Once you go back to the root managing box, click the drop down and select entire sheet.
On your rule in the applies to textbox put the full range of what you want to check.