The Sphinx's Lair

2:32 AM

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You are a space traveler and have ended up going to a casino at your friend Nazario's home planet. There, they have 2 currencies, called "greens" and "blues". Nazario shows you a game called blubberball where you must always bet 1 green and 1 blue per round, but Nazario explains his genius strate...

Sphinx

4:12 AM

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Q: Hero Worms and The Minotaur

And so, Wormeus had a great time, eating every apple in sight, surviving several close calls with the Pink Lady Stickotaurs, respawning after the occasional horribly squishy death, exploring different universes and making a name for himself within the Puzzling Stack Exchange community. After navi...

no-computers mazes humor

Stiv

9:04 AM

In case anyone who was invested in the puzzle is interested, I've added a few remarks to my Who's Missing? metapuzzle (now completely solved) to explain some additional Easter Eggs and thought processes. Now checkmarked and moving on to the next creation!

M Oehm

11:00 AM

@Stiv: The weekend edition of my newspaper features a puzzle with four images that share a common characteristic. This weekend's puzzle has a pineapple, a stone, a tree in a dome and a stone head, which would have been impossible for me to solve two weeks ago. :)

Sphinx

11:14 AM

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Q: What is the next term in the following sequence?

What is the next term in the sequence: QOP, UYR, TRT, GHV? The choices are: A. TMY B. UYT C. UUT D. MNO The question is from an MDCAT Sample Test, and I still don't know the answer or how to get to it. I have tried multiple approaches but I still don't get it. Edit: Here is the site:https://app....

pattern

Sphinx

11:39 AM

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Q: Can you find who is dead

Look at the picture and find who is dead? Source: briddles.com

riddle logical-deduction

Jafe

i really want the c4 to be IN+CL(IN)ING but i can't see how that word means "rambling" so it's probably not it

Stiv

12:10 PM

@MOehm Haha! I'm happy to have helped :)

M Oehm

Perhaps you have not only helped me, but also the puzzle setter to come up with an idea for this weekend. Or it was a case of "Great minds", and all that, of course.

Jafe

which is good because if they didn't have an idea for it two weeks before publication date i think they really needed one bad :P

M Oehm

(And you have certainly helped me to improve my mood next week, when I would read the solution after not having solved it. Spongebob Squarepants, right up there with Harry Potter, Friends and Doctor Who as far as my gaping holes of pop culture go.)

M Oehm

12:28 PM

Well, @Jafe, at least these puzzles don't have a preamble. ;)

Jafe

touché :P

Amoz

@Jafe you got it! It is not an obvious or clear synonym but from what I found, both can mean 'Present participle for to move around or sideways unsteadily' and both are listed as direct synonyms of 'zig-zagged'. As well as of each other on some lists.

Jafe

aha, i see!

spent way too long assuming it was either something inside ININ or ININ inside something

CCCC: Wielder of Mjölnir and Stormbreaker (maybe one of the Avengers) has serious injury here (6)

since we're fixing holes in people's pop culture knowledge

msh210

12:48 PM

@Jafe I assume it's gotta be Thor ax, though I don't know which of the Avengers might have an injury there.

Jafe

that is indeed correct

msh210

CCCC: Extremely nonbasic pen is shaking, maybe (6)

Jafe

(it's iron man, btw)

msh210

@Jafe TIL that's an Avenger :-)

Jafe

like i said, fixing holes :P

Sphinx

12:54 PM

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Q: A solitaire Blokus problem on a rectangular board

Rules As in Blokus, you have a total of 21 pieces (every piece from monomino to pentomino) in hand: All of these polyominoes are free, this means that you can rotate or flip them as you wish before placing them on the board. The only rule is that placed polyominos mustn't touch each other by the...

optimization board-games polyomino

Sid

6:06 PM

@msh210 can you explain? I am a bit lost about "Ax" and what the definition is

Deusovi

6:17 PM

"Wielder of Mjölnir" = THOR
"Stormbreaker, maybe" = AX
"one of the Avengers has serious injury here" = def for THORAX

msh210

6:40 PM

@Sid What Deusovi said.

Sphinx

7:07 PM

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Q: How to solve this question the original source of this paper is in the sof world IMO class 9

Image of the math Question I have tried many things such as adding them then squaring I have also tried multiplying them but to no avail

calculation-puzzle

Gareth McCaughan

9:05 PM

^ the people who made the test this is taken from have some nerve calling it the "SOF International Mathematics Olympiad". The International Mathematical Olympiad is a thing, and it is nothing like this routine cookie-cutter multiple-choice test stuff.

Stiv

9:44 PM

Note to self: Use 'cookie-cutter' as an insulting adjective more often :)

bobble

Hello, @Lost? Any particular reason you're here today, or are you... lost?

collapses laughing at own terrible pun

Lost

I was lost. I think I am found now (thanks to your comment)

msh210

10:02 PM

@Lost Were you blind, but now you see?

Stiv

10:14 PM

@msh210 Is this PHOBIC? pH 0 ('extremely nonbasic' on the pH scale) + BIC (pen) = 'shaking, maybe' (def)

msh210

@Stiv yep!

Stiv

Nice. Took me a while to crack the meaning of 'nonbasic' but once I had that, the rest fell into place :)

Stiv

10:37 PM

CCCC: Nothing vulgar entertains me prior to premiere of Shakespeare company farce (6)

Gareth McCaughan

@Stiv FA (nothing vulgar) entertains I prior to S(-hakespeare) CO making a FIASCO.

Stiv

@GarethMcCaughan Exactly right - well played

Gareth McCaughan

damn

Jeremy Dover

10:53 PM

FA is UK-ism, I assume?

infinigon

yeah, FA = f*** all, i.e. none at all.

Gareth McCaughan

It's certainly a thing in the UK; I don't know whether it exists elsewhere. Short for "f--- all" or, via a rather odd history, "Fanny Adams" (sometimes preceded by "sweet", whether abbreviated or not).

Jeremy Dover

I had certainly heard the full version...did not know of the abbreviation. Thanks!

Gareth McCaughan

(Fanny Adams was the name of a young girl who was brutally and gruesomely murdered in mysterious circumstances; her name was used in the Navy to refer to unpleasant meat stews, the idea presumably being that they were made from bits of murder victims; the usage broadened to encompass other varieties of unsatisfactoriness, and eventually merged with the already-existing FA meaning nothing at all.

)

Jeremy Dover

I'm sure other languages have this as well, but stuff like this is why I love the English language.

Gareth McCaughan

11:02 PM

CCCC: Genre of literature current among technical university's nerds (7)

bobble

11:28 PM

Is "change this puzzle somehow to have a unique solution" on topic? Is it open-ended?

also oops I bumped too many things at once :/

lost count

Gareth McCaughan

It's a question about puzzles rather than a puzzle, and what's been declared specifically out of scope here is open-ended puzzles.

bobble

My query about topicality was partially unrelated to open-ended puzzles; I wasn't sure if this format of question, setting aside its open-endedness, was on-topic. "Improve my puzzle" is... undefined? But then they defined it. I struggle to put into words my gripe.

I also apparently struggle to talk like a normal human being, my goodness.

Gareth McCaughan

It is widely held that a question is only appropriate for an SE site to the extent that it has, in principle, a single correct answer that someone could give, that would get the coveted green checkmark, and which would be all that need be said on the subject. That certainly doesn't seem to be the case for this particular question.

For my part, I don't agree; if the question provokes useful answers, especially ones that might be useful to other puzzlemakers in the future, then we should be glad to have it.

(Even if it doesn't provoke useful answers, it might be useful; maybe "modify this block-assemly puzzle with many solutions to have a unique solution" is actually a very difficult problem in most cases, and that (which might be inferred from the absence of solutions) would be useful information.)

*assembly

bobble

Is it open-ended for tagging purposes?

Gareth McCaughan

11:45 PM

I think probably not? The [open-ended] tag's description now just says "open-ended puzzles are no longer in scope", which doesn't really help to understand how it's intended to be used :-), but my guess is that it's almost always been used for open-ended puzzles and not for questions about puzzles.

bobble

> Used when the tagged puzzle is open ended to all solvers and could be "bested" at any point, if a given solver has a better solution that fulfills the askers requirements.

> Used when the tagged puzzle is open ended to all solvers and could be "bested" at any point, if a given solver has a better solution that fulfills the askers requirements. No answer can be guaranteed to be the last, best one.

> Used when no answer can be guaranteed to be the last, best one. If a puzzle instead has a provably optimal solution, tag with [optimization].

For some History (tm) of what the excerpt has said

Also, right now the except doesn't just say that they're no longer in scope, but perhaps you need to click in to see all

Gareth McCaughan

Yeah, all seems to be assuming puzzles not questions-about-puzzles. Oh, and there's also this:

"There are some open-ended questions that are still allowed. These include [optimization] puzzles where there is a provably correct answer (which the poster ideally will know ahead of time), and questions asking about a specific aspect of puzzle design"

which explicitly calls out questions about puzzle design as possibly OK even if open-ended.

(and seems to be pretty much the only thing there's ever been in the description of the [open-ended] tag that acknowledges that there are such things as questions about puzzles)

so, anyway, (1) pretty sure the question itself is fine, (2) I think it would be a little better without the [open-ended] tag, (3) I'm not sure I'd bother removing that tag myself, but if you want to then please go ahead :-).

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