The Sphinx's Lair

8:08 AM

0

Q: Numberlink strategy

Note: This is not asking for a general strategy, you can find that here. Is the following a valid strategy in solving Numberlink (Flow Free) puzzles (I like to call it 'unwrapping the grid'): 1...3 24.1. ...4. 3..2. ..... Since the 3s are on the edge of the box with nothing in the way, we...

strategy grid-deduction

9:43 AM

@Mithrandir Still stuck at 4d

9:57 AM

@Mithrandir dddd gives Chesterfield Airport

mapquest.com/us/mo/chesterfield/63005-1404/…

10:10 AM

0

Q: The new pill frequency

(based on a true story) For 2 decades, I've been taking prescription drugs. Recently, I've had my dosage increased from 1.5 pills in the morning and 1.5 pills in the evening to 1.5 pills in the morning and 2 pills in the evening. This means that every day, instead of 3 pills, I take 3.5 pills. ...

mathematics pattern

Mithrandir

@Techidiot nope.

Hex, I tell you! Hex!

10:34 AM

I tried 4dhex/hex4d/dddd/d4/hexM/Mhex/m4d/4dM/hex4dM no luck

11:12 AM

@Mithrandir Hawai

Pheww

Mithrandir

@Techidiot yesh

But why M then?

Don't get it? :-/

Mithrandir

...it was the first letter; first station.

Q: Anyone knows the approach to solve such puzzles and the answer to this?

1:01 PM

0

I don't know how to solve such puzzles. Any help is appreciated

logical-deduction

1:21 PM

Gamen all!

Gamen! I got another accepted answer ^^

Gamen y'all

Yeah.. :) Something was blowing up down there :D

Matt

Gamen indeed!

That "stupid answers" guy made me think of AK

I have 6 accepted answers now, woohoo!

1:26 PM

Yeah same @dcfyj - his profile and his answer got nuked.

I flagged his answer as soon as I saw it, and it got downvoted like nothing lol. was -5 in 5 minutes.

it hit -8 before going poof

I was typing my own answer by then

I think mine was the flag that pushed it over the edge, as it were. I hit it and it went bye-bye about 10 seconds later. hehe

Being able to see deleted posts, you see some really weird people posting some really weird stuff.

Q: I lend my talents to one man everynight

1

I am History and Heritage. I am the Strand's Source. I am an Extractor of Enrichment. Who am I?

riddle

1:30 PM

Ah, and there's the infamous marsupial in the flesh.

AK you're still not wanted. Please go away.

the account had stupid in the name right?

I think so

It's now "user34892" as that account is gone

ah ok

self delete? It would seem a bit harsh for one post for banhammer

Let's just say I don't think the reappearance of the Angry Kindergartener here in chat is a coincidence.

Neither do I

1:37 PM

And since I'm sure he's just here to enjoy the reactions to his latest puerile antics. I will hereby stop feeding the troll. </topic>

I'm hoping to figure out how to finish the puzzle I'm working on. It's a really hard build :(

What kind of puzzle is it?

stegonography

And when I say finish, I mean more start lol

Hehee

The sad thing is, I know it'll get solved very quickly :(

1:43 PM

I have a list of puzzle ideas some of which will never see the light of day

I've got two puzzles currently outstanding that don't seem to be attracting much attention, which is a bit of a bummer because both took quite a long time to put together and I'd like to see someone solve them.

I could take a peek, but I doubt I'd solve them.

Q: A Secret Job . . . but what is it?

22

Mr. Peters, a freelance muscle-for-hire sort of fellow, had been manning his desk for days now waiting for something to do when at last the phone rang. A job! The nerdy sounding person on the other end of the line said this was urgent... that meant he could jack up his rate. Rubbing his hands t...

wordplay enigmatic-puzzle no-computers

^ that one has a bounty and everything hehe

Yeah, not about to solve that lol

the exam is still outstanding?

I tried to create a word for two lines separated by a character but gives bad results

The exam is outstanding too, yes

1:47 PM

a word for two lines separated?

Well, it is outstanding, but I mean outstanding :P

Like this During a royal society chemistry seminar - , - some alchemist proclaimed an outlandish discovery!

You used a riddle I posted for it ^^

May be a single word which can form all of them :p

@dcfyj The hardest bit of this one is already done - getting the message itself

@Techidiot Not sure what you're trying to achieve

1:48 PM

@dcfyj I tried to get a good cross-sampling of riddles for it. I mainly targeted high rated ones

@Rubio What you believe to be the hardest bit, you mean :P

that had answers that'd be usable in a grid

@dcfyj I have this habit of complicating simple things :p

@dcfyj well, ok - fair enough. I should say, then, the most laborious part :)

That was one of the first (if not the first) thing I posted in PSE

@Techidiot I still don't know what you're trying to do, so I can't help you lol

Ah, second thing I posted on here

1:50 PM

@dcfyj The first line of a message says During a royal society chemistry seminar, some alchemist proclaimed an outlandish discovery!

ok...?

I was trying to form a single word out of the letters used in this line.

Unique letters

as in an anagram?

oh unique

Yup

Anagram of unique letters

Because, we have alchemist/chemistry kind of words

gpv are the unique letters :P

Also, a comma and an exclamation point.

1:54 PM

Oh no. By unique I mean, simple taking the letters which are used and removing the duplicates

According to the latest hint, we need to do the same thing we did earlier but with a little change

I removed any and all duplicates from the sentence :P

Still going with that letter/number puzzle?

Which one?

Insanity?

yeah

Oh, the OP is lost.

?

1:57 PM

I am not sure if there is a way to find the pattern without any hint

@Techidiot There is something you need to do first. The whole business about "twice" is critical.

Leveiux and I had dropped comment but there were no replies

Oh, that's where you got that sentence

@Rubio I tried to learn as much as I can using the word Discount, but due to my lack of English skills, I am not able to relate it to the messsge

Why are you focused on the one word Discount?

by the way - for anyone curious about the imgur problems earlier caused by the S3 issue, you may find this interesting -

arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/…

2:01 PM

lol. I read the comments where you specifically linked it and asked the solver to Capitalize it and that's what caught me into it

Lol. Sooner, someone is going to release the actually incorrect command that was triggered

oh ... that was just to explain its meaning in the message. otherwise the message doesn't make sense. (There were earlier comments also about little details of punctuation that make the message more readable, but I deleted them after he made corrections)

Oh..

2:19 PM

zerg rush

Wh..oooo...aaahhhh...?!!

Or my other favorite, Ohhhgodi'mgonnahurl...make...it......sstaaahhhhhpppp!

One of the first two killed my firefox :)

lol

cipher story steganography

Btw, my puzzle is pending to be attempted as well

6

Q: Finding Detective Jack!

I am Aidan and I am a detective. I am in a country I have never visited before. Me and my colleague Jack have been working on a task for a few days now. We have been very successful in solving a murder mystery which took place a few days back. Our success has unfortunately been bad eyed by a grou...

When I think of creating an easier puzzle, I make it even more harder. :-s

This time, I added more design to make it easier to interpret and now it looks like too much work to do I guess :p Not sure if there is any secret solver out there

I'm just impressed at how much Jack was able to write in the short time he had while trying to escape armed criminals

to say nothing of how long it took to devise the whole thing and then sneak it into your jacket before rushing out the back

Jack's pretty nimble and quick. :)

2:34 PM

Lol. @Rubio May be he was awaiting the moment and had the plan already in mind :)

@Rubio He's still slower than this girl

lol

That one cracks me up every time

Haha

That comment!

Dan's?

Yeah

2:36 PM

Yeah

+94 epicness

But just want your inputs, if you can, what goes in the mind looking at my puzzle? I really want to know how a solver sees it? Would be interesting :)

logical-deduction lateral-thinking

0

Q: The round table

Three couples are dining together at a round table and they've all just ordered their desserts. Two waiters arrive at the table, both of them holding three plates. One is bringing the desserts for the three people on the left side of the table, the other is bringing the desserts for the three peo...

2:56 PM

@Rubio I think this one tops them both :P

3:07 PM

@Techidiot For Detective Jack? I don't even know how to start it, so - nothing comes to mind.

@Rubio Isn't the flow chart helpful there? :-/

Oh, I know where to start, just not how

Q: Clarification (details needed) resolving the "hardest logic puzzle"

0

I am referring to the truth, lying and random gods puzzle, linked here (be careful, the solution is in the Wikipedia page!) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hardest_Logic_Puzzle_Ever Please, DO NOT GIVE THE SOLUTION OR HINTS, I am just looking for clarifications! I wanted to know : wha...

logical-deduction

My reaction to "Detective Jack": 1. Looks complicated. Lots of stages, not clear how much indication there will be of having got any given stage right. 2. There might be a way in "in the middle" -- perhaps "R izwazx ..." is Vigenere-encrypted and I can attack it that way. (So I tried it for a few minutes -- without success.) 3. The riddle seems like it might be soluble, though there won't be much confirmation of having the right answer. (So I thought about it a little, but nothing came to mind.)

4. The "x gives y" stuff all seems rather opaque -- too much "guess what happened to be in the setter's mind". I thought about it for a minute or two and nothing was very obvious. The italicized and struck-through letters make for extra confusion here.

sorry: italic, struck-through, and bold. Seems like too much going on and too little information to go on, somehow.

Wow. Yes, all of that. Thank you for clearly stating what I was feeling and didn't really know how best to express.

3:18 PM

5. At this point I notice that I have been misreading that first bit ever since I first saw the puzzle. What is (of course) actually a struck-through "c" I was reading as a slightly wonky set-membership symbol. Still not at all obvious what to do with it.

The flowchart makes the intended solution path appear to start from the stylized a/b/c/d and the numbers, but what you're supposed to do with them and how it lets you decipher the next encrypted text block is entirely unclear, and with no way "in" I am stalled at the outset.

I tend to avoid attacking puzzles mid-stream, so I hadn't even looked at the middle bits very much

@GarethMcCaughan Brute force might not help with cipher.(though the key is meaningful but not a word)

And again, the gives thing is just an enumeration. It could have been (4),(6) etc

I wasn't expecting the key to be a word. (I assume, also, it's the reverse of whatever comes out of the previous step.)

That's right. :)

So it looks as if maybe those counts equal the number of bold, italic, struck-through, capital letters in the first block of gibberish. Obvious guess, then, is that we're meant to unscramble the gibberish somehow (e.g., maybe it's ciphertext from a simple-substitution cipher), then extract the letters with given characteristics, ... and then maybe they'll form informative words or something.

(note: none of this is fishing for confirmation or anything)

I'm just answering the question: what goes through the head of someone attempting to solve this?

3:25 PM

Yeah. I am getting to know that. Which helps. But, well, I have stated, Vigenére is the way

Also, I have learn that gibberish plain text is not helpful and is not a good practice. So, I have avoided that

Well, there are (perhaps) two ciphers here. The puzzle seems to indicate that the second block of text is Vigenere-encrypted; the first isn't so clear. If it's meant to be used to find the key for the second block, it seems like it should be an "easier" cipher to break from scratch. It isn't any sort of Caesar shift, nor is it Atbash.

The puzzle block says "key for 2nd block is hidden in the 1st cipher block. Vigenére will be the way". So, no other cipher technique is used

Feeding the first block of gibberish into a Vigenere-solver just in case doesn't look promising. E.g., it suggests a key length equal to the actual ciphertext length, which is never a good sign.

oops, sorry, that last bit is incorrect

Yeah. I have tested it before posting. Half of the time, I can find the key using a solver

not a key length equal to ciphertext length

but a surprisingly long suggested key length

3:31 PM

Well, even if I give you the length, it won't help I guess.

If you look at the flow chart

the a gives ... b gives .. is a feed for next block right?

there are lots of ways to interpret that

What I said above was my best guess at it, though of course it could be all wrong

that is:

Like how?

Obvious guess, then, is that we're meant to unscramble the gibberish somehow (e.g., maybe it's ciphertext from a simple-substitution cipher), then extract the letters with given characteristics, ... and then maybe they'll form informative words or something.

Hmm.. But there's is a relation you can see forming between those two blocks

Right?

You can utilize the text version to get a clearer look. May be that will help a bit

I remark that in the leftmost box "a b c D ...", a is bold and "a gives 4" and b is italic and "b gives 6", and "bold"/"italic" have 4/6 letters. But I think that's coincidence, not least because I don't find any words of the right length for c and d :-).

yes, there's a relation between the blocks

as I said above:

So it looks as if maybe those counts equal the number of bold, italic, struck-through, capital letters in the first block of gibberish.

3:34 PM

Yes

But does that match?

well, it looked at first glance as if it might do :-). I suppose I should actually count more carefully.

I am not sure if it does. So, you can skip that step. Also, that doesn't sound much of use. Like what are you going to get if they match anyway?

hmm, maybe not; I can only find three boldface letters now I look more closely. But it's rather hard to tell, whether I look at the image or the plain-text version.

I will give some time for that puzzle. Lets see if someone can come up with the right interpretation.

I was too quick to close this

What am I going to get? I don't know but, for the third time, my conjecture was that there might be some not-too-painful way to decipher the first block of gibberish, and that then if I pulled out the letters corresponding to the boldface ones I'd get a 4-letter word; if I did the same for the italic ones I'd get a 6-letter word; etc.; and that these words would form a short message indicating the key for the second block of gibberish.

If, on the other hand, that first box with the a b c d in it is meant to be a puzzle-ette to be solved in isolation, then the only idea I have is the one above about "bold" being 4 letters etc., and that really doesn't seem promising.

3:39 PM

Yes. That would have been a common practice. I have this thing to mess things up :)

Nope. There is no individual solution for that. First one is feed for second. (Only saying that because, interpretation of a flow chart may differ from me to you)

Hi @tpk - you seem lost, maybe :) Welcome to PSE and TSL

@Rubio Why not this? I am bad at these but just asking

Ted Faye
Hugh YVONNE
Benjamin vanessa

First, it's a round table. (buahaha)

These are the pairs

Yes assume its a round table

:p

Benjamin and Vanessa are served by different waiters - that's given - so they must be in seats 3 and 4.

3:44 PM

But, 2 and 5 will be served by different waiters as well right?

2 and 5 are not n ext to each other.

"Benjamin and Vanessa, who are sitting next to each other, are served by different waiters."

Oh opposite and next

Yup right

Thanks

I have no idea how to find the color of the table though.

May be its about wife's :p

They have a habit of ordering food according to the color of the tables

Haha

After all, its lateral thinking

@GarethMcCaughan Any clues about this ?

@Techidiot Nothing beyond what I said in my comment to Pokemon's answer.

3:54 PM

Oh, missed it.

I mean, it seems to be implied that we do something to the "reduced" message that's similar to what we did to the original one except that somehow it involves things that occur twice. So I tried looking for various classes of things occurring twice, and didn't see anything promising.

Hmm

I see something promising. :)

Maybe Tech could remove his silly "email" question and replace it with one more relevant. I could just spit out another hint but it'd be fun to exploit the story aspect here a little hehe

Done that :) Wasn't silly though :D

It would be exceedingly unlikely that Mr Peters is getting emails from Harry Potter. :)

4:03 PM

Oh, could have been relevant if the final answer was related to wands/hogwarts/magic :)

I'd think a wizard would have just cast Obliviate at the reporter and have done with it. :)

Order Unfiltered word count Occurrences Percentage
1. a
2. this
3. discount
4. but
5. our
6. some

You're missing a word

7. Thomas

There it is

4:05 PM

@Rubio tpk is AK.

I already did that but I though its kind of steganography so skipped it

@Deusovi I assumed as much.

@Deusovi I thought so, but I wasn't sure

I see the question has been asked before on Meta, though there didn't seem to be a clear answer - why are suspended users not also suspended from the chat rooms for the fora they're suspended from?

Chatrooms are global, that'd be pretty hard to do, methinks

4:07 PM

The commentary I saw was somewhat handwavey about not banning them from all chat, but unless I am badly misremembering what I read, it did sound like there was room for restricting them from specific rooms via direct in-room ban

Well, tpk doesn't exist on Puzzling.

yes but AK does, and he is watching us right now

I'd wave to him but I don't use that sort of gesture

lol

I think it's very sad what happened to Arbitrary Kangaroo. I don't mean what anyone else did to him; I mean what he did to himself. Smart guy, good puzzler, but it seems that somehow he got so angry at Puzzling that he couldn't bring himself to do anything but sneer and troll.

@Deusovi in case you're wondering, what brought up AK is the thought that this rather rude answer was made by him.

4:10 PM

I just hope he doesn't repeat the same pattern in the rest of his life (jobs, relationships, ...). That would be a route to misery.

@Techidiot There's no steganography in this puzzle. Or, at least, nothing I'd call steganography; the whole process of getting the message from the nonsense text doesn't seem really steganography to me, but if you think it is, then ok :)

@GarethMcCaughan No kidding, that'd be rough

@GarethMcCaughan Agreed.

@GarethMcCaughan Agreed agreed.

So, anyway. a some this thomas but discount our. Those are the twice-occurring words in the "reduced" message of Rubio's puzzle, in order of appearance. They don't seem like enough to make anything interesting out of.

4:11 PM

@GarethMcCaughan Maybe it's the positions in which they occur?

May be take the letters used and make a word out of it?

Assuming he wasn't lying about his age, and I have no reason to think he was, it feels like a manifestation of a lack of maturity that, hopefully, he'll grow out of. I just think it unfortunate that some people actually do have a mindset that leads them to decide "If I can't enjoy this, I'll make sure nobody else can either."

@Deusovi Possibly, but that seems too different from what needed doing the first time around (all indications are that the second step is meant to be similar in spirit to the first).

@Rubio And some find enjoyment in doing that, sadly

@Techidiot It's rather a lot of letters.

4:12 PM

How's that different from what was needed the first time? That's actually exactly what was done the first time.

Having said that - there is a twist.

@Rubio I was replying to Deusovi's "Maybe it's the positions in which they occur" which is very much not what was done first time around.

@ArbitraryKangaroo That's a very good advice you have got. I don't know you and no history about what happened. But if you were a good part of the community, be good again if you get a chance. All the best! :)

You guys are close enough that the right question will give a proper nudge in the right direction.

hmm, I wonder which letters occur twice in "a some this thomas but discount our".

seems like probably too few to be useful

@GarethMcCaughan Oh. Sorry, I misread that ;)

4:15 PM

A S O T M U I I guess

Anyway - feel free to 'email' Harry, he's standing by to help, if he can. ;)

Well, I know it's not an anagram of "a some this thomas but discount our" ROT13'd (I took "with a twist literally) :P

Lol. No, not literal. :)

that'd be a LOT of anagram fodder.

Is it something to do with how it sounds while speaking? :) Like a this could give AT HIS or Atheist? :p

One of my friends was doing some very poor puzzle that involved a 21-letter anagram.

4:17 PM

complicating things again

It wasn't clued either, and it was split into 3 7-letter strings.

HT DT DO EN EB EU HU RY RN -> 18 letters

:) I found this today while taking a tour of PSE

Hm?

Anagram of a treasure related thing

so we have letters ABCDEHIMNORSTU, of which AHIMORTU occur at least twice and AHIM occur exactly twice. The whole lot, counted by multiplicity, seem like way too many letters; there'll be a ton of anagrams. There doesn't seem to be a single-word anagram of AHIMORTU, nor of AHIM (though MAHI MAHI is a kind of fish...).

rearranging the words of "a some this thomas but discount our" seems obviously useless.

4:19 PM

@Deusovi THREE HUNDRED BOUNTY

Oh right!

9000 questions!

Actually hold that thought, I just deleted a question :P

@GarethMcCaughan So you're correct, it's not a single word anagram. I've expected to need to hint this to have it be solvable, but there's one piece (I think) you can intuit before that hint is needed. (And technically, if you're really lucky you might hit on the solution without a hint, but I don't expect it.)

Anagrams of ABCDEHIMNORSTU include "chordate nimbus", "staunched bromide", "moribund cheats", "atomised brunch".

you might hope TREASURE would be part of it, but there is only one E. But of course we might be doing a sort of inverse of what happened at the start, forming lots of words out of the letters we've got -- but then that seems like there are waaaay too many possibilities.

too broad, VTC ;)

4:28 PM

well, yes

That would be sheer cruelty

Were you hoping for TREASURE for some particular reason?

Wah? How did this get 52 thousand views???

... ?!

wow

That's it, I'm using that title for my next puzzle. :)

:P

No very specific reason to hope for TREASURE other than that we're in Treasure Hunt Fortnight (or did that finish?) and all its letters are in the set.

(The letters of HUNT are there too.)

4:31 PM

oh. hm.

This puzzle was supposed to be for the Word Play fortnightly, but took too long to finish. :)

@GarethMcCaughan two days left

oh, and there's something about (what I take to be) a movie or television programme called National Treasure in the puzzle.

Oh yeah, so there is. I wrote this so long ago I forgot that :)

Q: Programming News Paper Puzzle

6:25 PM

0

This puzzle appeared in my local paper, while I am unable to solve it - maybe you guys can take a crack at it. Page 1 Page 2 They were scanned at pretty high resolution, so you should be able to see better when you zoom in. Feel free to suggest any tags.

computer-puzzle

Matt

^ now who wants to transcribe that?

huh, a 1 rep user posted images... I thought you needed 10 rep for that

@Matt Sounds like you're volunteering :P

Sconibulus

I can't even see it, Imgur doesn't work at work for me (but Stack's version does) ((apologies for capslock))

Q: Your not so normal 'Who am I?'

6:45 PM

0

This Who am I? Is a little more in depth, with a few puzzles to solve to get to the final answer. First let's start off with a short story riddle. From the story you should get two answers. One is 5 letters, the other 6. An old man wanted to leave all of his money to one of his three sons, ...

riddle cipher crosswords nonogram

Matt

7:28 PM

I wonder if it's possible to save it as a pdf and then get the text from that

9:50 PM

0

Q: A strange message

Yesterday I helped my grandfather clean out his attic and amongst some old papers I found a peculiar message, that seemed strange to me. Upon asking my grandfather what this was about, he told me that he and a few of his friends founded a club of sorts and anyone that could figure out the pass ph...

cipher enigmatic-puzzle