The Sphinx's Lair

12:00 AM

But that wouldn't really stop you guessing the logic puzzle as based on the kind of logic "trick" rather than "I'm not participating in this". :)

... Unless you suspect that the person setting the ~~logic~~ puzzle intends for you to do something like that, I guess ...

Prince North Læraðr

12:10 AM

Urm @Anonymus25-ReinstateMonica why do you want access to the DnD chatroom?

bobble

I second this question

There seems to be no reason

Especially if you were going to interrupt in the middle of a session

Anonymus 25- Reinstate Monica

12:38 AM

I misclicked

Sorry

@PrinceNorthLæraðr I don't like misclicking, 'twas an accident

Sphinx

1:42 AM

0

Q: Foo Clue and Who?

A simple puzzle I thought of during a WFH-session today. Enjoy :)

Anonymus 25- Reinstate Monica

3:45 AM

Just made a new riddle, hopefully better than past ones

Sphinx

0

Q: The Poem of Love and Grace

Here is a simple poetry riddle I just thought up. Enjoy! (I'll add another tag to help tommorow.) A king, so great, lives fifteen years more, A giant, so mighty, his power so easily tore. A sheperd, in the wild, a stick to a snake, A death, so loving, causes the entire land quake. A man, so true,...

riddle poetry

Sphinx

5:27 AM

4

Q: Now you're Packing with Portals #2: Hashtag

Place the colored shapes into the white area, without rotations or reflections, so that they fill it perfectly. The gray walls don't just block shapes, though - they act as portals! When you place a shape, it has to stay in one piece, connected as it was before. However, cells separated by a gr...

logical-deduction visual grid-deduction polyomino

Prince North Læraðr

Man, weather's been weird here in SoCal

It was hot today, and now it's raining

Here's the weather from like the past week or so:

Start of last week: It was hot. Like 80 degrees-ish hot

Saturday: A lot of rain

Sunday: Some rain, temperature plummets to very very cold

Monday: Windy as heck

Tuesday: Still windy as heck

Wednesday: Semblance of normality

Thursday (today): Raining at night again

Bubbler

6:54 AM

That's some kind of... puzzling weather

msh210

7:33 AM

Should puzzling.stackexchange.com/q/97298/93 be tagged as a maze? I mean, you do have to get from a starting point to some (to-be-found) "end", with various possible wrong turns along the way.

Bubbler

It does look like a maze to me

Graylocke

I agree :)

Sphinx

7:56 AM

0

Q: Wordsmiths & Wyverns

You awaken in a foul crypt with only the following items at your disposal... ROPE, BOOTS, AMULET, MAP, FLAIL, CHAIN, CUP, BELL, STAFF, RING, CODEC, RUM, FLUTE You also have the following tools. Awl (x1 use) — destroy a single letter from any string Hammer (x1 use) — destroy any string of 2 or mor...

wordplay language sequence

Graylocke

You are quick, @Deusovi :P

Deusovi

thanks! lots of options there - not too hard of a puzzle

Graylocke

No - I was about to post when I saw your answer appear :)

Deusovi

now, if they had to make new words each time, that would be another question...

Graylocke

That would have required other belongings methinks.

Deusovi

8:04 AM

probably, both in terms of items and magical tools

Graylocke

Yes ^^;

Deusovi

but it would've made for a much more constrained puzzle

Stiv

8:20 AM

CCCC: I am climbing around Switzerland with nearly-new apparatus (7)

msh210

8:44 AM

@Stiv ma(ch)I ne_

Stiv

@msh210 That's correct. Tag back to you!

msh210

10:05 AM

CCCC: Jilted lover: a fellow (dude) (guy) in love with… apples? (4,7)

Sphinx

2:41 PM

0

Q: Is this Prime Sequence the longest?

So you are interested in Prime Numbers and puzzles thereof. You saw the following on PSE and gave it a try and got it long after the correct answer was posted by @hexomino. My Eight Cousins But then you think that you could design another puzzle. So you start with 2 prime numbers say A and B wit...

mathematics primes

Sphinx

3:07 PM

0

Q: Sounds like you need something to do

What word am I thinking of? Each group will give you part of what you need. Group 1 split, peel, bunch, dump Group 2 Vermont, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina Group 3 Merlin, Percival, Mordred, Morgana, Oberon Group 4 apple, wrench, water, horse, ice cream, pencil Group 5 red, yellow...

word knowledge connections-puzzle

Sid

5:53 PM

(I was about to ask someone to pin the new CCCC. Thanks to whoever did it)

Sphinx

7:27 PM

0

Q: 3 x 2 sliding puzzle

Would it be possible to solve a sliding puzzle like this (x is the space)?: 1 3 2 4 5 x I haven't been able to solve this and I don't even know if it's possible.

riddle mathematics logical-deduction

Rand al'Thor

7:49 PM

@Graylocke ^ I second that ;-)

Prince North Læraðr

9:05 PM

@msh210 Is dude and guy actually part of the clue?

Deusovi

it could be

msh doesn't have to tell you

Prince North Læraðr

No I mean like is it part of the clue

Deusovi

looks like it

Prince North Læraðr

Okay

Deusovi

i'm sure it wouldn't be included if it wasn't

Prince North Læraðr

9:07 PM

I wasn't sure if he was trying to clarify that it was a guy or something

Deusovi

that would be a very strange thing to do

Prince North Læraðr

Yeah. I don't know, I'm not really thinking straight right now >.<;

bobble

9:31 PM

I realize I phrased some things poorly initially here, but is there anything to do now?

(see comments)

smci

@bobble: I appreciate your vigilance, but that comment interaction you had with me was offtarget. Bye

bobble

oh gods, do not want more discussion with you, smci. I'm leaving.

smci

9:49 PM

@Sphinx That one's superb

@sphinx et al: I'm loooking for advice on constructing a cryptarithm using ~15 letters of which 5 are leading, obviously some digits duplicate, with a hard'ish constraint that leading digits are nonzero, and some soft constraint on making as many digits distinct as possible (i.e. no three-of-a-kind). Any general advice? Obviously I can't post my draft here. And obviously it blows up almost all solvers. I was using mod-2 congruences to get constraints to narrow down the search space.

Prince North Læraðr

@smci Your answer for #1 is basically the same as the one that bobble linked

It uses the same concept: take a seven-sided coin, roll it

smci

@PrinceNorthLæraðr No it isn't the same, and I've just spent 10 min explaining to bobble in comments why it isn't the same, for three or four distinct reasons. But as I pointed out to bobble their comment (and now yours) would be mistakenly interpreted by a casual reader as a call to downvote. Please read through the comments and the answer more carefully.

Prince North Læraðr

Actually, I've spent the last 30 minutes reading through both answers and the comments to try to understand what is going on

And the comments of that answer point out that other 7-coins in the world

smci

10:16 PM

@PrinceNorthLæraðr For like the fifth time, my answer is both distinct and adds value. a) My answer gives three distinct methods, agreed? b) My answer actually tells you how to construct a rollable (constant-width) Reuleaux-polygon coin. Flat-edged coins are not rollable. c) The other answer did not mention n-sided coins. I didn't even notice that buried in a spoiler tag it mentions a round coin with n-sided motif/label. d) Hence, most of us (including me) wouldn't have read those old 2016 comments.

Beastly Gerbil

I'm not sure that mentioning a particular example is enough to constitute a whole new answer, and probably should be a comment under the other answers. However, as the other two methods are unique, a new answer is acceptable.

However I haven't read through the whole question and answers fully

Prince North Læraðr

My main problem with the answer as a whole is that it strays away from the point of the question in the first place

Your solution for the coin is no different than rolling a seven-sided die

smci

@BeastlyGerbil It's not "mentioning a particular example". It's "citing the algorithm to construct an entire genre of (unbiased) rollable n-gons". Naively clipping the edges off a round coin would create something that was a) biased and b) unrollable. It's one thing to conjecture that n-gon coins could be created, another to show how they could be created perfectly unbiased (as you can see, many other answers are obsessed with eliminating bias on M dice rolls) and also rollable.

@PrinceNorthLæraðr Now you're missing the point of the question. You don't have a seven-sided die. The OP explicitly labors that point. (You don't have an eight-side or higher die, either). I'm pointing out how the wording "You have a six-sided died and a coin" would admit a (rollable, unbiased) polygonal coin.

Beastly Gerbil

Like I said, theres 15 answers and I haven't read through them all so I'm not in a good position to judge. The question is also 6 years old and has a lot of answers, so I imagine it might be mentioned but even if they do, it's a minor issue on an old question with lots of answers. The answer is also valid for the other 2 answers, so it's not really worth argueing about.

smci

10:40 PM

@BeastlyGerbil No, it's not a minor issue, for the sixth time. Conjecturing that a perfectly unbiased rollable N-sided coin might be feasible but giving zero details is not an answer. And an unrollable N-sided coin is not an answer to the question given. Neither would a biased one (look at all the work other answers did to eliminate bias on M dice rolls). I cite how to construct the thing, no one else does, in fact noone ever mentioned "Reuleaux-polygon" on this entire site...

...and it's only ever been mentioned 22 times on MathOverflow, either. This is distinct and unique information. There are obviously lots of bad ways to created a biased coin roll to generate 1..7.

bobble

Look, smci, I understand that you're Really Angry about this. Maybe it would be best to step away from the discussion for a while?

Prince North Læraðr

@smci You're arguing about the wording, which I understand. However, the reason being why (presumably) a seven-sided dice wouldn't work is because that defeats the purpose of the question. Why go through the entire scene if you could just grab a d7? In the same way, how would rolling a seven-sided coin be any different in concept than rolling a seven sided dice?

Deusovi

no, the reason a 7-sided die wouldn't work is because the question specifies a 6-sided die

Prince North Læraðr

Right, but the reason being for that is because a) 6 sided die is the most common and b) to avoid the shenanigans of taking another sided dice (like a 7 sided dice) and just rolling that

Deusovi

That's a big assumption about the OP's intent.

Prince North Læraðr

10:46 PM

I think it's a reasonable assumption given the context of the problem

Deusovi

OP did mention that "out-of-the-box solutions" were valid. And smci gave a plausible way that this could actually happen, not just saying "oh the coin is a magical coin that happens to be exactly what I want it to be". So I think this doesn't fall under our policy of removing "[lateral-thinking] answers to a non-[lateral-thinking] question".

Jeremy Dover

FWIW, the wording of the question specifies the die has six sides, but it does not specify anything about the coin. I actually think smci's answer is interesting and valuable.

Deusovi

^

smci

@Deusovi Thanks. That's what I pointed out 20 min ago.

@JeremyDover Thanks Jeremy. And moreover, I don't just conjecture that it might be feasible to be both rollable and unbiased, I show to construct it.

bobble

The OP indicated that solutions with a d6 were intended solutions

Deusovi

10:48 PM

...and?

There can be more solutions than the OP intended. That is not the fault of the answerers.

Beastly Gerbil

The question is probably too broad or may invite speculative answers in that case surely?

bobble

look. I really don't want to argue about this, and the original "you phrased that so poorly" comments and chat ping have me... quite upset.

I thought I had something quick and non-arguable to add, will leave again now

Deusovi

I agree that to some extent, using the physical nature of the components seems 'cheaty'. It may not be the intention, but it's not clear from the question alone. I would prefer to leave a comment asking OP to clarify if they wanted solutions that did not depend on the physicality of the components, and then edit in the clarification if necessary... but the question is very old, and the asker is highly unlikely to respond.

Beastly Gerbil

I've voted to close. If a question has 15 answers and new answers are valid/invalid based off the authors intent, then I see that as inviting speculative answers

Deusovi

That seems like a reasonable response as well.

Beastly Gerbil

10:53 PM

May prevent some arguments too

smci

@PrinceNorthLæraðr I'm not "arguing" about wording. I'm pointing out why my answer is unique and novel, and is admitted by the OP's phrasing. ("How would rolling a seven-sided coin be any different in concept than rolling a D7?"* is a semantic question to the OP's premise, not me). By the way, I also mention the use of dollar serial numbers to (repeatedly, unbiasedly) generate arbitrary random numbers (a la "Liar's Poker"). Even more "out-of-the-box", we could say the coin has an n-digit RFID serial no.

bobble

Dipping back in to emphasize this, for the final time: I never said that smci's answer was of no value. One of the arguments they gave as to why my "same answer here" link was invalid was that they hadn't seen it. Not reading an answer is not an excuse to duplicate it. I was responding to that alone.

I was perfectly "convinced" (to the extent that a person who can't understand the answer can be convinced) that their answer was valid, just was trying to explain that not reading other answer is not an excuse to duplicate. Any time that argument is brought up I will respond. If there's some math mumbo jumbo as to why it isn't a duplicate, fine. But don't say it's not a duplicate because you didn't bother to read to check there wasn't a duplicate.

Deusovi

Bobble, please. Stop.

You keep joining, leaving one comment, and leaving again. This is not the way to have a productive conversation.

@smci For what it's worth, I think using the serial number of the bills is a step too far. If you assume that you have knowledge of any arbitrary data, then you could also just assume that you had memorized the contents of en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… , and not have to bother with either the coin or the die.

smci

11:24 PM

@Deusovi I also thought that using (RFID) serial numbers of coins or bills is a step too far, that's why I labeled it 3b) and mentioned that caveat in the answer (remember: OP specifically framed this all back in 2016 "I know of two [valid] ways to do this, but they're slightly out-of-the-box solutions... I'll let people try to answer first before revealing my solutions." but never disclosed them.

Deusovi

They appear to have put what they were thinking of in the question, and they're all the standard solutions. But I agree that they still may have been open to more "out-of-the-box solutions".

smci

11:44 PM

@Deusovi: OP specifically framed this all back in 2016 "I know of two [valid] ways to do this, but they're slightly out-of-the-box solutions... I'll let people try to answer first before revealing my solutions." But turns out those were Bob's and MikeEarnest's answers, using only the coin (three flips) and only the die (two rolls) respectively. And they don't use physical properties of anything...

... It would be better to simply edit the question directly to say so, than try to use this as close-reason. (I wouldn't even call them "out-of-the-box", just "ways to use (repeated) coin-flips or dice-rolls to model arbitrary probabilities, without introducting bias, or requiring excessive flips/rolls").

Sphinx

0

Q: As Slaughter Crept unto the Sheep

Turn in my lord! Turn in my lord! But water I cannot afford. Some milk is best at your request. Now hide you and get you some rest. But as he sleep, to him she creep, As slaughter crept unto the sheep. Then with a nail, his head impale, So saved the day lady __________. What is the lady'...

riddle word knowledge rhyme poetry

smci

@Sphinx and anyone else: I asked earlier; anyone got any advice on constructing to that cryptarithm with 15 letters of which 5 are leading, obviously some digits duplicate. (I'm thinking constraint-satisfaction approaches based on congruences?)

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