You'd send a letter to me, but I'm not quite what you think.
You'd send a letter in me, but only if you didn't know me.
I was a gem in my day for being both bold and precise.
I stood strong in the face of graves and grave faces.
126.18.119.4.190.79.9.35.30.90.113.111.21.52.75....
StackExchange Top Ranked Girl Hackers
The Stack Exchange Hacking Federation (of course fictitious) has just released its list of top-ranked female hackers for the year.
Using only the clues below, match each hacker to her number of wins (un-crackable programs she wrote) and losses ( programs...
Sally smiles at her older brother and says, "Happy 30th birthday!"
He shakes his head and replies, "I'm not 30 yet, but you are!"
How is this possible?
Cindy Tyler gave birth to a beautiful boy. She wanted her husband's suggestion to name him. Her husband was away on a mining exploration job. She texted to him
For our beautiful boy please send me a name suggestion
Her husband, a mining and materials scientist and a riddle enthusiast sent h...
Just out of curiosity - when did you decide to be a tree? I wood go out on a limb and take a guess, but leaf it to me to go barking up the wrong tree. And, no, this isn't a twig question.
So, I posted this open-ended puzzle a while ago, looking forward to all the fun around it and the upvotes that would pour in.
Nope.
That question ended up with a score of +1, and 4 downvotes.
It was my first and last open-ended puzzle. It also sparked some discussion on TSL, where Deusovi said...
have tried to solve this sequence,I suppose that it has been created from the combination of a,b,c,d,e , That's the sequence:
(a,c), ?, ?, ?, (a,e), ?, ?, (c,d), ?, (d,c)
my logic: we just try to do all the possible combination :
(A,B) (A,C) (A,D) (A,E)
(B,A) (B,C) (B,D) (B,E)
(C,A) (C,B) (C,...
@CStafford-14 Sorry but your answer here isn't actually an answer to the puzzle - and from your comments i'm pretty sure you're aware it's not. You might want to delete it, as at this point it's only likely to draw downvotes. (No sense in waiting for the community to tidy up invalid answers when you can just do that yourself.)
This is a challenge for word-puzzle lovers. It might be a bit more of a game than a puzzle, but I think it is not limitless in it's answers, so a final answer could be found (eventually).
What is the longest list of growing anagrams which can be put into a grammatically correct English senten...
"Good" is relative. Good for that type of puzzle would be one where clear criteria for a "best" answer is given, and where it is open-ended because the asker doesn't know what will end up being the "best" answer
Most of these tend to be fairly well constrained word puzzles, much like the one @North just posted
There have been two other questions here and here that are similar to this one, but this changes the rules up a little.
Your job is to approximate $\pi$ using the sequence of digits (in order):
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
with operators inserted between them (permitted operators listed below). You are t...
Rhopalic sentences are sentences which have words whose length is one more than the previous word. eg:
I do not hunt birds.
I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indeciphe...
Yup. I mean, what qualifies as a "sentence"? Most of these don't have a sensible meaning, they degenerate into word salad. And, at that, there's always questions about what qualifies as a legitimate word.
Yeah. I think Deus mentioned how restricting a "word" to be something locatable in a specific dictionary is unsatisfying, but NOT doing so is likely to be too unconstrained - falling into "well what IS a word" territory
I mean, some answers will clearly be valid. Some won't pass the sniff test. Ideally the best answer is one for which the validity is not at all in question. But that's not always going to happen.
I don't think the problem is the tag. There are, as we've shown, some at least adequate or better examples of open-ended puzzles that, I think, show the tag and the format show sufficient merit to not nuke from orbit
The problem is that there are a lot of less than stellar puzzles that would be problematic under any tag, because they're ill-conceived, poorly constrained, lack "best answer" criteria, or other similar failings.
I'm not excited about making exceptions for specific types of bad puzzles. If they're bad, they're bad. Downvote, vote them off-topic for "primarily opinion based" or "not specific enough", or whatever.
So do what I do. Post comments on why a question or an answer is a poor fit. Then make sure it's either flagged or voted so it gets into the review queue. And then let the community address it. People do read comments, and hopefully are guided to do the correct thing when they read them.
We'll always have new users. See, to me, it's the height of unthinkable rudeness to start posting in a "forum" where you aren't aware of the local customs and rules. I always read a bit, get a feel for how the place works and what is (and isn't) ok before I undertake to post there myself. For those folks, the more instructive comments they stumble across and the more upvoted good examples (and downvoted/closed poor examples) they have as reference, the better.
The folks who don't bother with any of that because HEY LOOK A TEXT INPUT BOX JUST READY TO ACCEPT MY BRILLIANCE, HERE GOES YOLO! aren't going to learn from any amount of guidance we offer beforehand; for them, we want to cut them off early, and turn them into good examples of BAD examples, for the folks who actually do pay attention to such things
The problem with open-ended though, is that the tag description itself can lead it to usually become broad. The good questions become the exceptions, rather than the majority
I agree that can be said with any puzzle
You'll always get more poorly thought out riddle than a clever one
But when people upvote bad posts, consistently, that's where I think there is a crossing of lines
Albeit it, I have done that few times because it was funny, but I guess I'm still immature in that sense. Yet when several posts with 25+ upvotes marked [closed] or [duplicate], then there's a problem with perhaps understanding within the community
Well, yes. There is often a frustrating lack of understanding in the community.
Things that are obviously someone else's content get upvoted and answered, instead of closed as lacking attribution. That's a no-no.
Things that are clearly off-topic, math homework problems in particular, get answered instead of closed on sight. There's literally no excuse for that, and yet it happens.
People post "lateral thinking" answers to questions that are obviously not looking for lateral thinking answers, and other folks are all, like, oh that's hilarious, have my upvote! instead of marking them as Not an Answer
I mean - the whole point of a curated collection of quality questions and answers is .. well ... the curation
If I may insert myself (inelegantly) into this conversation... I've only been an active member of PSE for a month or so, but I've followed the site for a year or so, and one of the main issues I see going on right now is the lack of participation overall, whether it be asking questions, answering questions, or, as Rubio mentioned, moderating the site in a consistent manner.
A lot of the top contributors in the past rarely post nowadays, and as a result several low-quality posts slip through the gaps and become "the best"
If you take a look at the monthly top questions for this month, for instance, you don't have to scroll down too far to start finding questions that are too broad, do not have proper attribution, or otherwise are lacking in puzzling elements.
@PiIsNot3 And (seriously, not trying to single you out) what are you (all, collectively) doing about that? The ideal moderator is one who doesn't have to moderate at all because the community, seeing questions that are too broad or lack proper attribution or whatever, deal with them.
"I need suggestions for puzzles I could put in an escape room" would categorically be off-topic (it's a list question where no relevant answer is less or more valid than any other). Trying to "fix" it by adding criteria might work but I am hard-pressed to imagine any criteria that would apply.
Even "I want to do a medieval themed escape room, what would be some medieval themed puzzles I could use?" is too broad
But "I remember a puzzle from some Die Hard movie involving jugs of water, what was that puzzle and how do you solve it?" would be an on topic question (though not a particularly good one).
@Mithrandir I was just joking :P I think a main part would definitely when they're folloing a red herring
@Rubio Oh yeah, going back to site moderation, I think some users just kind of expect the moderator to act as an omni-present police officer and don't make an effort to do anything about it. Just like a bystander
Something that I appreciate about @Brandon_J was that they stepped up as soon as they understood and had the oppurtunity to do so
@North yup. at which point, if only to avoid the "broken window" effect, we sort of need to step in and deal with things. but ideally we just signal what needs to be done, and only take action if the community ends up getting it wrong
or if, because of some well-intentioned but poorly timed edit-from-review, something that should have been handled that way ends up unilaterally marked "ok"
StackExchange Top Ranked Girl Hackers
The Stack Exchange Hacking Federation (of course fictitious) has just released its list of top-ranked female hackers for the year.
Using only the clues below, match each hacker to her number of wins (un-crackable programs she wrote) and losses ( programs...
Sally smiles at her older brother and says, "Happy 30th birthday!"
He shakes his head and replies, "I'm not 30 yet, but you are!"
How is this possible?
Cindy Tyler gave birth to a beautiful boy. She wanted her husband's suggestion to name him. Her husband was away on a mining exploration job. She texted to him
For our beautiful boy please send me a name suggestion
Her husband, a mining and materials scientist and a riddle enthusiast sent h...
What links
Southwest Flight 3551
Iberia Flight 3692
Aeroflot Flight 6582
Can you name another flight in this unusual group?
have tried to solve this sequence,I suppose that it has been created from the combination of a,b,c,d,e , That's the sequence:
(a,c), ?, ?, ?, (a,e), ?, ?, (c,d), ?, (d,c)
my logic: we just try to do all the possible combination :
(A,B) (A,C) (A,D) (A,E)
(B,A) (B,C) (B,D) (B,E)
(C,A) (C,B) (C,...
This is a challenge for word-puzzle lovers. It might be a bit more of a game than a puzzle, but I think it is not limitless in it's answers, so a final answer could be found (eventually).
What is the longest list of growing anagrams which can be put into a grammatically correct English senten...
There have been two other questions here and here that are similar to this one, but this changes the rules up a little.
Your job is to approximate $\pi$ using the sequence of digits (in order):
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
with operators inserted between them (permitted operators listed below). You are t...
Rhopalic sentences are sentences which have words whose length is one more than the previous word. eg:
I do not hunt birds.
I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indeciphe...
