The Sphinx's Lair

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12:00 AM

Q: My prefix, suffix and infix are right in front of you right now

My prefix, suffix and infix are right in front of you right now, displayed in this order: Suffix Prefix Infix What am I?

Q: I am thinking of a number

I am thinking of a number between 1 and 5000. It is the product of two primes. I tell my brother the larger of those primes, and to my sister the smaller. You are allowed to ask each of us questions, first to my brother, then to me, then to my sister, and so on in turns, which we will always resp...

mathematics

3 hours later…

Anonymus 25- Reinstate Monica

3:26 AM

One of my questions on Chess SE just got me 100 rep, and my rep on Puzzling, here, my parent account, has 37 rep. Is chess more of my thing then?

matt

4:08 AM

rep does not equal intelligence

bobble

@Anonymus25-ReinstateMonica that question got upvotes because if referenced a popular franchise, not because of anything else intrinsic to the question.

1 hour later…

Graylocke

5:34 AM

@Anonymus25-ReinstateMonica Only if you enjoy chess more? I wouldn't look to other people to validate what you like best :)

Graylocke

6:16 AM

I never know whether to add interesting potential answers that are almost certainly not the intended answer. :/

1 hour later…

Graylocke

7:45 AM

@Sid I have done so much word play on this I am going crazy and reverting to ddefs (or in this case tdefs)! Could it be 3 definitions of LANDED? Scored a goal in the sense of a touchdown, you can "land a job", and settled/landed as in "come to rest"?

Graylocke

7:57 AM

Or my wordplay guess... Scored a goal is IN, which gets a job DEED and then INDEED it is settled?

3 hours later…

msh210

10:34 AM

@Graylocke this seems plausible (or settled as in "landed gentry", those who're settled on land)

Anonymus 25- Reinstate Monica

Hi msh!

msh210

10:50 AM

hello

3 hours later…

Lukas Rotter

1:57 PM

All the words described have their vowels numbered as a prime (I am considering 1 as a prime) but Ian Mckellen is not working. Also, those question marks -- do they mean anything? Like are you asking whether it satisfies the condition or not? [Originally posted as an answer because user hadn't enough rep to comment -- The Mgmt] — Aghilan 2 hours ago

What the hell does "The Mgmt" mean? "Signed - Mega great mod team"?

msh210

@LukasRotter management

1 hour later…

Gareth McCaughan

3:13 PM

Can confirm: I'm the one who wrote that, and I did indeed mean "management"

Lukas Rotter

Sounds like a commonly used abbreviation. I'll blame my ignorance on the fact that I live in a german-speaking country

Gareth McCaughan

e.g. see catb.org/jargon/oldversions/jarg231.txt and search for "the mgmt".

Lukas Rotter

ah, very nice :)

3 hours later…

Lukas Rotter

5:50 PM

@bobble FYI, I can't automate things like this, where the asterisks marking special cases are only contained within the image (unless I overkill with OCR, which I will not). In these cases I'll either edit them manually if I come across them (will do in this case) or leave them be

bobble

gotcha

Sphinx

6:47 PM

Q: A Difficult Wacky Sudoku - SS#8

An entry in Fortnightly Topic Challenge #47: "Wacky Sudokus" Other puzzles in this series Welcome to the eighth puzzle in this series! For more information about the series, see the first puzzle and the introduction. Enjoy! This is the first of what I would say are the two hardest puzzles in th...

logical-deduction grid-deduction sudoku

Q: Not so random walk

I'm out for a very long walk, and I’m bored, so I decide to walk in a mathematical way. The first image shows the first 500 steps, and the second image is my path after 50000 steps. The colors are mostly for visualization purposes. My path is not random, so how did I select my path? Please let me...

mathematics

2 hours later…

Sid

8:32 PM

@Graylocke I am sorry, LANDED isn't what I had in mind but ir seems to fit very nicely. Not a great clue from me, I guess.

On that note, CCCC Hint : GrayLocke is on the right track.

Prince North Læraðr

With the tdef or the INDEED?

humn

Too good to pass up, sweethearts: We've done our worst and we could better.

And out.

Lukas Rotter

8:57 PM

If it's a tdef, I can't think of many 6-letter past-tense words for "Scored a goal" other than NETTED and maybe (slang) BURIED and BAGGED, which all don't make sense with the other defs

(Unless "Scored a goal" is completely detached from sports. Achieved, etc)

1 hour later…

Graylocke

10:27 PM

@LukasRotter This was exactly my problem :) Which is why I "settled" for LANDED... But I guess back to the drawing board.

1 hour later…

Sphinx

11:54 PM

Q: Relationship between terms

Let's have the following terms: $4d, 4d^3, 6d^2, 4d,1, 6d^2, 6d^2, 4d^3, 2d^2,1, 4d, -2d$, where $d$ a positive integer greater than one. What is the relation between these numbers? All numbers have to be used.

number-theory

Q: The Blank Sudoku

An entry in Fortnightly Topic Challenge #47: "Wacky Sudokus" (h/t to Beastly Gerbil, whose 1,2,3... Trinary!!! puzzle provided inspiration for this puzzle) This puzzle is a normal Sudoku, with each digit from 1-9 appearing once per row and column, and once in each square. The variation is in the...