The Sphinx's Lair

Sphinx

00:13

0

Friend: Hey! want to see what I'm solving? Me: Yeah sure. Friend: showing an image Me: Oh, come on, why do I wanna do reverse puzzling again!? Friend: Oh, just put it on a Q and A website then. This was the image: Question: What where they solving? Bonus Question: Try solving it.

HTM

01:12

Looks like the CCCC message has been unpinned yet again...

Sphinx

02:44

0

Q: 9 people sitting at a round table

I am trying to solve the following question but I am stuck (I will not post the source for sometime, as I don't want anybody to get influenced by the discussion there.) 9 people are sitting at a roundtable . Each person has a score, which is a positive integer, associated with him. Each person's...

mathematics logical-deduction

1

Q: Red Herring Redherring

Red herring redherringredh Redherri ngredh Red herrIng red HErrING reD heRring Red herRing rED herrINg REDHERRING rEd HErring reD HerRing Red hERriNg Red herring Red HerrIng rED hErrInG reD HerrIng rED herRInG red herRInG Red herRiNG reD herRiNG reD herriNG Red hErrING rEd herrinG...

word knowledge enigmatic-puzzle visual metapuzzles

HTM

03:04

@Sphinx Someone please come over to my place and take all my "red herri," I don't want to get diabetes

Bubbler

"Red herri" must decode into "Ooh yummy" :D

Sphinx

04:49

5

Q: Slitherlink: Around the W0rld

Rules of Slitherlink: Connect adjacent dots with vertical or horizontal lines to make a single loop. The numbers indicate how many lines surround it, while empty cells may be surrounded by any number of lines. The loop never crosses itself and never branches off.

logical-deduction grid-deduction humor slitherlink

Sphinx

05:40

0

Q: Puzzle from school

Our school has created a puzzle for students. It starts with an image, as uploaded here Also, there is caption below the image, as shown below. Any ideas? Thanks!

cryptography

0

Q: Cubes touching all other cubes

This question is based on this great puzzle: Puzzle about 6 infinite cylinders in space What is the most number of identical cubes that can be placed, such that every cube touches all the other cubes at some location?

geometry

HTM

06:09

@Sphinx I never knew that a grid deduction puzzle can have a sense of humor like that. Props to athin for the amazing construction!

Jafe

hah, that's really clever

Sphinx

06:55

1

Q: Traffic light controller

Consider the following diagram. Once every 2 seconds a car enters from the top and travels down towards the exit. Once every 3 seconds a car enters from the left and travels to the right exit. In the beginning there are no cars. On the 2nd second a car will enter at the top. On the 3rd second ano...

mathematics optimization

humn

07:58

What is going on?! Internet is loused up.

Took me a good part of an hour to hook up.

Someone is fucking around.

When i get angry, sparks fly.

Enough said? Bye.

Sphinx

09:02

0

Q: Infinite beauty

This is a follow-up to Puzzle about 6 infinite cylinders in space Question: Given six identical infinite (no caps) cylinders is there a beautiful arrangement in space such that each touches each other. What you need to know is that beauty to a complete philistine such as myself means symmetry. ...

mathematics geometry construction

Stiv

09:56

@HTM I blame your Red Herring puzzle 100% for my lack of productivity today... Have solved 5/9 of the mini-puzzles but really must put it to one side now! Will hold off posting anything partial until at least tonight if it remains unsolved, but I get the feeling Deus will snaffle this one while I'm working anyway! Thoroughly enjoying it - great puzzle so far :)

Oh and in case anyone else is working on it, the ones I've got are #3, 4, 5, 6 and 8...

Sphinx

10:17

0

Q: Mysterious object

Cut me, I am still normal. Change my colour, I am still normal. The only way you can make me change is to draw on me. Change one of the letters and I am a dog. Change another one and I am poor.

riddle

Lukas Rotter

12:12

I think its safe to say at this point that the current FTC was a flop as well. If no one minds, I'll put the bot to sleep (for now) and edit the main post accordingly. I'd suggest still keeping the suggestion thread alive, so once it would be "natural" to restart again (e.g many popular suggestions), we can continue as if nothing happened.

Stiv

@LukasRotter Normally I would say to hold off, as there might be a late flurry. But since this is the Easter weekend coming up I don't anticipate an awful lot of activity on this front... As much as I would like to be proved wrong, I think you are probably right.

Also, sigh - I really wish people wouldn't post answers this partial to good, detailed questions...

Sphinx

0

Q: 3-Sliced Square

I remember this one time when my brother told me "with just 3 lines, how many shapes can you form in a square piece of paper?" After 30 minutes, my 7-year-old brain thought that I could only make 5. However, my brother told me "no, you can make seven. " My brain exploded right there. Now, with my...

geometry

Stiv

13:11

ARGH! This partial answer doesn't even completely finish off the mini-puzzle it claims to have solved! (resist, resist...)

Lukas Rotter

Another annoying part about things like this is that when you eventually post the full solution, it just looks like you have piggy backed off of everyone else, even though you haven't

Stiv

Indeed. My personal feeling is that if a puzzle's been up for less than a day you shouldn't post a partial unless you have solved more than half of the puzzle and have tried your hardest to get it as complete as possible.

Otherwise it feels like someone just trying to score some rep for minimal effort rather than properly engaging with the puzzle, which is supposed to be the spirit here... :)

Anyway, don't want to go off on a rant here...!

Gareth McCaughan

13:38

I generally agree, though when a puzzle is made up of lots of somewhat-independent subpuzzles I think the puzzle author should say if they don't want partial answers that just solve one subpuzzle.

(And I think puzzle authors are absolutely within their rights to say that, and solvers should respect it, and partials that ignore it should be, at minimum, downvoted.)

But if not, I don't think I can blame someone for figuring out one of the subpuzzles and posting their solution to it.

(So I think one of the two partials currently on that question is reasonable, and the other not so much.)

Stiv

Perhaps - I think I just figure it's a lack of ambition to stop at a single sub-puzzle... Maybe that's just a personal hang-up...

And BOOM, here's Deus with a very good partial! :)

Deusovi

yeah, a 1-subpuzzle partial would disappoint me personally, so I'd work to get as many as I could before I absolutely had to stop

(here, the missing bits appear to mostly come from lack of knowledge on my part, and research has failed to yield anything productive... I had most of this a few hours ago but had to sleep because it was Very Late o'clock)

Stiv

Deus, I'll comment on your post with the extra bits I have at present - I can fill a few of your gaps...

Deusovi

I can't fault anyone for posting a single-subpuzzle partial, though - especially for fairly new puzzlers, that might legitimately be as much as they can get. and it is a significant enough portion of the puzzle that it satisfies the criteria I talked about here

(also, great! looks like you've gotten puzzle 4? that one was very difficult for me - I just got the two that were puzzle hunt memes :P )

Gareth McCaughan

I want the meta to produce (by interleaving) FOOLED YA, which would be appropriate today and fit the red-herring theme, but unless I'm confused the letters don't quite work: we have FoO-L-Ya.

Deusovi

13:47

ah, of course - that would make sense

then maybe my backsolve of SCALY is wrong

Stiv

It's definitely going to be themed around today, that's for sure :)

Deusovi

(oh, and apologies for scooping you then, if you had most of what I did)

Stiv

Just commented - I only had 3/5 of the songs identified - I've TRAWLED the net for the others still without success. They'll likely spell LUNCH, as we have LU?C? from the letters indicated by the mechanism.

Gareth McCaughan

Qat finds exactly one thing that would go in place of SCALY if the relevant letter is an E rather than an L. (I won't say what in case using computer help for that is considered improper.)

Deusovi

yep, that was my first guess but the other puzzle pretty clearly needs to extract ??L??... from the single entry I have...

that could be wrong too

Stiv

13:50

No worries - I figured you'd likely made good progress yourself and held off because of timezones, plus you do have puzzle 7, and twigged how to make use of the meta. That's entirely fair to post.

Deusovi

@Stiv ah no, it's LURCH, for FLOUNDER

Gareth McCaughan

Another issue with SCALY is that surely the one letter you actually have (assuming your fish-identification is right) is an L in the third place, not the fourth.

Stiv

Aha, just got that third song then - WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD by LOUIS ARMSTRONG, yielding RED (R)oses

Deusovi

yes, that is a very good point

oh, nice find!

Gareth McCaughan

FLOUNDER of course fits with my guess for the final answer.

Deusovi

13:57

indeed it does, and I'm very confident in it being correct now

(well, I was when you mentioned it, but I'm even more confident now)

Gareth McCaughan

Unfortunately, Qat's identification of the word that goes in the place of SCALY is not compatible with that L in third place. (Nor any of the other three alleged words it finds if I use its "union" dictionary.)

Deusovi

right, which is why I think it's very likely that my L is wrong

sadly I have close to zero knowledge of fish, and can't find the place those pictures were taken from

Lukas Rotter

Thank you very much for the frosty reception, hope you really loved it! I hope you like breaking more teenager's hearts due to hard criticism and not even saying what I have done right or wrong. Thank you very much! — tdserapio 13 mins ago

Had a feeling this would happen. Someone who cares and is not as socially incompetent as me might want to try and explain to them how flawed the question is, and that it's not a personal insult :)

Deusovi

sure, I can give it a shot

Gareth McCaughan

Are the letter-counts in the Latin names believed to be exact? The last one looks quite a bit like a pink salmon, which has the right number of letters in its common name, has something reddish in its name, and has a lengthy Latin binomial -- but not quite as lengthy as the lower fish would imply.

It feels like they should be exact, of course.

That would make the last letter S which is compatible with what Qat says :-).

Deusovi

14:06

i'd be very surprised if they weren't exact, but that could be a mistake in the puzzle?

Gareth McCaughan

Seems unlikely somehow.

The counts are 15,15 and the actual Latin name is 12,9, so it's not like there's just one extra or anything.

Deusovi

ah, yeah

i'd also be surprised if multi-word fish names were unspaced, because the binomials are given spaces

bobble

14:41

On my continual quest to convert the convertible MathJax tables, I have encountered one that would work perfectly if rotated 90% (so that the labels would be headers). Would it be wrong to do so? Technically it's changing the presentation of their answer. puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/33431/…

humn

17:07

@Deusovi , you are next.

Lukas Rotter

:o

humn

Devious deserves the best.

That's what's next.

The dang needs a stroke.

I can do that with words. Meow!

Truly, Deusovi needs a cuddle. The dang has dangled for all to see.

You too, @LukasRotter ?

Would not be surprised.

Me too.

I expose myself in the most odd ways.

Someone's gotta.

Deusovi

well, that's ominous

Lukas Rotter

better check twice from now on if all the doors are locked & windows are closed. maybe some barricades for good measure

Sphinx

19:07

0

Q: My former self is still inside of me... you'd only care when I'm inside of you

I am a four letter word and I was strong. Sadly got reversed and now I am weak. But... my former self is still inside of me. You would only care if I'm inside of you. What was I, and what am I now?

riddle word

0

Q: Is it possible to create an ambigram, or an ambiguous image, with more than two interpretations?

According to the wikipedia page, an ambigram is defined by Douglas Hofstadter as: "An ambigram is a visual pun of a special kind: a calligraphic design having two or more (clear) interpretations as written words." This definition allows ambigrams with arbitrarily large number of interpretations, ...

visual

HTM

19:21

@Stiv Thanks! I can now add that to my list of accomplishments: "Made a puzzle so intriguing that it literally caused a loss in productivity"

@Deusovi (and @GarethMcCaughan @Stiv) I put a comment under Deus's answer that may help you all with "Red herring redherringredh"

@GarethMcCaughan I will confirm that this is so (the letter counts, not the fish identification)

Lukas Rotter

19:37

So 3 = rot13(NGYNAGVP)?

HTM

@LukasRotter +1, I think you got it

Sphinx

22:06

0

Q: Construction of positive integers by given rules

For a positive integer n there are two operations defined: append one of the digits 0, 4 or 8 at the right end of n n can be divided by 2 if n is even Start number is 4. Is it possible to construct any positive integer with those two rules? Example to construct 55: $4\to44\to22\to220\to110\to55$

mathematics number-theory

0

Q: Wormeus and the Stickotaur (maze 2)

Here is another Wormeus maze, following a previous puzzle that is yet to go viral. Wormeus has to eat all the apples without dying a horrible squishy death at the hands of the Pink Lady Stickotaur. I believe this maze should be slightly more challenging since there are fewer opportunities to reco...

no-computers mazes

Sphinx

23:22

0

Q: Find A and B so that they are never equal

In a game can either double X and add one to Y or double Y and add one to X. Here's an example sequence of steps that he could take: (0, 1) => (1, 2) => (2, 3) => (4, 4) => (8, 5) You want to prevent making X and Y equal. Choose X and Y for him so that they are never equal.

game game-theory

Transcript for