The Sphinx's Lair

Sphinx

03:05

0

Q: Finding the number of poisoned bottles

This is a well-known problem (discussed here and here), but I am adding a twist to it. A king has 100 bottles of wine and poisons $K$ of them, where $0 \leq K \leq 100$. You have a supply of rats and need to determine how many of the bottles are poisoned. You are not interested in finding the act...

jafe

04:11

CCCC hint: the fourth letter is W

Sphinx

04:45

0

Q: Random sum adds to 1000

A randomly number is generated between 1 and 1000 inclusive, and added to a sum. A new randomly generated number is generated and added to the sum until the total sum is greater than or equal to 1000. What is the probability such that the sum adds up to exactly 1000 before exceeding it?

mathematics probability

Specter Prophet

@GarethMcCaughan it's from a mathematician profile I don't know why it is written that way

I am curious what it says

u can try with the date first

it is number

Specter Prophet

05:10

sports.ndtv.com/cricket/videos/ndtv-458796 even this website got this kind of pattern

debian.org/doc/manuals/apt-howto/ch-distros.ta.html

mathforums.com/members/mathematician.19421/#about

I don't know if 3 of them are different

Sid

05:35

So if someone can clear this up with me, I have a logical reduction problem that is proving impossible to solve.

*deduction

Now if I post it on the main site, I need to provide references and tbh, all I can say is, it is from a random site on the internet

Is that fine or not?

Deusovi

no

Sid

It's not from any live competition if you are worried about that.

(And new profile picture. Niceee @Deusovi)

Deusovi

If you post a a question on the main site, you need to provide references: there are a few different reasons for this (preventing questions from ongoing competitions, tests, etc). I don't think we should encourage asking questions in here to get around those rules.

(Thanks!)

Sid

It's not from any ongoing competition as far as I know

oAlt

06:46

@jafe C + A + TWO MAN, though I'm not really convinced that a "couple of people" is "two-man" exactly.

If I understand correctly, it would be more of "of/for/by two men", but not "two men"...?

idk

jafe

07:03

@oAlt that is correct

i was thinking "a couple of" = TWO, and "people" = MAN (general term for the human race)

as in "man cannot fly" = "people cannot fly"

(also the "about" was intended to be CA) :P

oAlt

07:16

Knew it, I wasn't parsing correctly lol

This one's gonna go quickly, I presume

CCCC: Notice, perhaps, a tiger hugging hail (6)

jafe

a siberian tiger, i assume

not much hail in the jungles of india

Sphinx

08:06

1

Q: Vampires, Insanity and Transylvanian Sisters

This is a puzzle from this site: https://medium.com/i-math/vampires-insanity-transylvanian-sisters-88ce3516fd I thought it was very nice, so I wanted to share it with you. WARNING: the above link contains the answer! Inspector Craig of Scotland Yard was called to Transylvania to solve some cases ...

logical-deduction

Puzzling Meta

08:47

0

Q: Seeking tool to generate data, as if for puzzle

I am here to publicize my question Tool to build test data for boolean logic because I found myself describing what I am looking for as do you remember, those old logic puzzles? Mr Smith does not wear a pipe. Mr Jones lives next door to a man who wears a hat ..... who lives in the house with the...

discussion

Sphinx

09:21

1

Q: The Existence of Total False Sudoku

Is it possible to construct a valid $9 \times 9$ puzzle of Total False Sudoku? Total False Sudoku is a regular Sudoku puzzle where all given clue numbers are wrong. A valid puzzle is a puzzle that has only a single solution.

sudoku construction

Gareth McCaughan

10:02

@SpecterProphet What you're looking at is an example of mojibake, which means text that's been encoded into bytes in one way and then decoded into text in another. The word is Japanese and has four syllables, not three. I think the "moji" at the start is the same as in "emoji".

One particularly common way for this to happen is for stuff to be encoded using the UTF-8 encoding, and then decoded using some 8-bit-only scheme like ISO-8859-15 or CP1252.

There's a tool called FTFY (short for "fixed that for you") that does a pretty good job of figuring out what's happened in these cases and telling you what the original text probably was.

Unfortunately it doesn't appear to have a way of telling you what exact transformations it's performed.

Gareth McCaughan

10:20

Your first block of gibberish it turns into नितॠलिंखा which is all Devanagari. It would transliterate as something like "nitalinkha". So far as I can tell that doesn't mean anything in any language, nor is it a place name, nor does Google find anything useful for it. So maybe the fixup hasn't worked quite right.

I suspect the problem is that those ¤ symbols are not the original mojibake output but are placeholders inserted where e.g. the font you're using doesn't have a character corresponding to the one in the original data.

The second block fares even worse, but I'll come back to it in a moment.

So why do I think any of this is any use? Well, your third block turns into काठमाडौं, नेपाल (still all Devanagari characters) which is how they write "Kathmandu, Nepal" in Nepali.

The second block has a ton of those ¤ probable-placeholders. Again, I strongly suspect that they are not the "right" characters.

If this is stuff you are reading on a webpage, the issue may be that the page is lying to your browser about how the text is encoded (or maaaybe not saying anything and your browser is guessing wrong; I have a vague recollection that the relevant standards require your browser to interpret not-saying-anything in a particular way that isn't helpful, but I might be misremembering).

In Firefox, which is the web browser I use for preference, the "View" menu has an entry called "Text Encoding"; on the pages you linked above it defaults to "Western"; changing it to "Unicode" produces what I think is the correct output. E.g., the Debian one has a title that begins like this by default: "
APT à®šà¯†à®¯à®±à¯à®ªà®Ÿà¯à®µà®¤à¯ à®Žà®ªà¯à®ªà®Ÿà®¿?"

but if I tell the browser to interpret the bytes the server's sending as Unicode (which I think more specifically means the UTF-8 encoding) then instead it says "APT செயற்படுவது எப்படி? "

which is Tamil for "How does APT work?" and presumably that's correct.

(I think the ".ta" in the URL means "please give me the Tamil version" but for whatever reason the server isn't explicitly telling the browser that it's sending UTF-8 text.)

In this case the server is definitely at fault (I have to say I'd have expected better from the Debian project). There's nothing in the headers to specify the encoding, but the page itself has, in its HEAD, <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> which means "I am sending you text in the ISO-8859-1 encoding".

That's completely untrue for this particular page. ISO-8859-1 is for Western European languages and the actual page content is UTF-8 not ISO-8859-1.

The browser is then doing exactly what it's been told by the server: interpreting the bytes it's sent as text in the ISO-8859-1 encoding. Unfortunately this is not at all what those bytes really are.

Specter Prophet

10:37

Gareth McCaughan

The good news is that when you see this kind of nonsense it should be pretty easy to get your browser to override the lies it's been told and display the right thing. What browser do you use?

Specter Prophet

Chrome

Gareth McCaughan

OK, give me a second.

Specter Prophet

I literally don't have idea about unicode but it sounds related to CS

I only know ASCII which is taught in foundational course

May be I should go learn about it in a few moment

it seems like my browser doesn't compile these IS0-8859-15 or CP1252

Gareth McCaughan

... so it seems that Chrome doesn't in fact give you the option of overriding its choice of encoding, which is stupid. There is at least one Chrome extension that lets you do it, but I would hate to recommend something to you that turns out to work badly or spy on you or anything like that, so give me a few more minutes.

Confirmation that Chrome doesn't have this feature even though it used to: support.google.com/chrome/forum/AAAAP1KN0B02JIo6Yu7K-I/…

The removal was part of something called "Project Eraser" whose mission was to "make the Google Chrome browser less complex by removing obsolete or rarely used features". Alas.

Specter Prophet

10:48

Well may be for a faster browser and to occupy less storage

Gareth McCaughan

Won't make any difference to the speed, negligible difference to size. I think the real goal is to make it look simpler and less intimidating.

Specter Prophet

This might be off topic

Why does some user have 100 reputation but no question or answer

and says keeping low profile

Gareth McCaughan

11:06

OK, I suggest chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/charset/… which seems like it does the job, is well liked by its users, and has been updated recently.

I had a look at its code and don't see anything malicious, but of course I can't guarantee that tomorrow the author won't update it and make it do evil things.

If you're an established user on one Stack Exchange site and you join another, you get a 100-point bonus as soon as you join.

Sphinx

11:27

0

Q: An interesting,scary and an old riddle

One night I was visiting a friend of mine . I didn't visit him for a long time , though he was a very old friend . We had the following conversation :- Friend :- I am very happy to see you my friend !! Me :- Yeah , it's good to see you again !! Friend :- Will you stay in my home tonight ? Yo...

riddle logical-deduction mystery

oAlt

12:00

(btw can someone pin my c4 lol)

(unless someone else gets it first lol)

jafe

12:37

a notice is a letter, "perhaps a" is a letter, and if you see a tiger hugging hail you just let 'er

oAlt

13:38

lolll

Specter Prophet

13:52

@GarethMcCaughan thanks sir I will keep reading the code when they update but how did u read the code?

oh looks like it has in github

John Dvorak

Pro-tip: "u" isn't a word

Gareth McCaughan

14:09

Getting the code is rather a pain. I followed the instructions at stackoverflow.com/a/14099762 (note that this isn't the accepted answer to the question; that one was excellent when the question was first posted but no longer works). That gives you a file called something.crx, which is actually a zipfile and can be opened by ordinary archive-reading software (you might have to rename it to something.zip). In there there's some HTML, some Javascript, some CSS.

I think the likelihood that it turns malicious is very small, but you can never be quite sure :-).

(There are easier ways once you've installed the extension. But I didn't want to do that before looking at its code.)

jafe

@JohnDvorak "u" is definitely a word in Chambers

and yes, i know that's not the word you're talking about, but unnecessary pedantry will be answered with unnecessary pedantry

2

John Dvorak

I don't watch every Netflix series in existence. Or in fact, any ;)

jafe

14:24

Chambers, the dictionary

John Dvorak

Would adding "in English" be sufficient to achieve correctness?

jafe

they have "the letter u" or "anything shaped like the letter u" as a noun, and "typical of or acceptable to the upper classes" as an adjective

John Dvorak

Ah. They don't count, they define literally as figuratively.

The former definition doesn't really sit well with me, and in the second case, wouldn't it be an abbreviation rather than a word?

jafe

hmm yeah could be

it's clearly short for "upper-class"... but it's not a word i've heard used at all so i don't know if there are situations where you could say "u" but not "upper-class"

Gareth McCaughan

14:45

It's short for "upper-class" in a very specific context. Look up "U and non-U".

John Dvorak

It can also abbreviate "university"

Sphinx

0

Q: Jill's flight security woes

Jill is on a flight when she spots her friend a few seats behind her. She tries to get his attention, and is immediately tackled by security. What did Jill do to warrant such a response?

riddle story

Sphinx

17:18

0

Q: move just one match

Make a correct equation by just moving one matchstick!

mathematics lateral-thinking matches

Sphinx

17:43

0

Q: What's the last line answer?

What's the last line's answer? from this source

mathematics pattern

Sphinx

18:33

0

Q: What kind of encryption this would be?

I got the omhak bxjcs setup. All of the weuao bjkqa are working. The next step is to gxxah lcbgu lmxbq btgtb bdlzn oiqul a. Then we should be ready nbgii xuaxg qjfjw p. nrdww xkhwu oqlzu nistq kxpuq ihnnj l Hint: One of the words in the phrase is "necklace". Every encrypted word is either 5 or 1...

cipher

Sphinx

20:14

3

Q: Find the ages of mathematician's children

Mathematician: "It was the August of 1997 when they barged into my house..." - Here is his story: Students surprised their mathematics teacher with a cake on his birthday. The teacher was delighted when he noticed that every single year of his life is accounted for with a candle. He repeatedly t...

mathematics logical-deduction calculation-puzzle

Sphinx

21:54

0

Q: I am number one, Who am I?

I was bored, so I made another riddle! Enjoy :D I am number one, and number two, and number three, but I will never reach A-level. People pick me up and slam me down a lot. It can hurt sometimes, although it isn't terrible (after all, I can handle a little shock) Don't touch me too often, I've b...

riddle story

Gareth McCaughan

22:42

@oAlt I think the solution to your CCCC is AVE inside CAT making CAVEAT ("[a] notice, perhaps"), though the definition seems a little dicey to me.

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