The Sphinx's Lair

AncientSwordRage

00:01

@bobble people do not seen to understand how this site works...

Jafe

00:51

might as well ping @DarrelHoffman since you're talking about him

oAlt

01:32

A share: yesterday (July 24 GMT) was not the best day to try out Independent's cryptic crossword... A lot, if not all, of the entries were fair but hard to parse. And there were some I simply couldn't get. I got 67% done then gave up lol

Jafe

interesting, haven't tried that one yet

Sphinx

0

Q: Ten Pills in Ten Countries

You're about to leave for an international vacation where you'll be visiting ten different foreign countries. To make sure you don't catch any local diseases, your doctor has given you ten pills and instructed you to take one as you arrive in each country. The pills all contain different medicine...

Jafe

i generally like the independent a lot, the biggest thing that bugs me is sometimes you're expected to know a bunch of britishisms (or worse yet to have followed british news)

obv both are on me for, well, doing the crossword of a british newspaper hehe

oAlt

Lol yeah

oAlt

01:54

Feedback fwiw (altho idk if anyone else other than Jafe does Independent crosswords):
rot13(V yvxr guerr naq guvegrra qbja: gurl unq arng pyhvatf. V qba'g yvxr bar qbja, ubjrire. Gur vaqverpg nantenz ("qravny" = "ab" gura nantenzzrq jvgu "vf" gb trg "fvba") V guvax V pna gbyrengr, fvapr gung jnfa'g uneq gb trg, ohg ubj gur urpx jnf V fhccbfrq gb xabj gung n "zna" jnf n purff cvrpr? Vg'f abg rira n fgnaqneq bar...)

Jafe

02:08

a poetic way to say "that's... sadly" would be "alas, it is", and -itis is a suffix for diseases, but i can't find any reference to an eye disease named alasitis so maybe not

M Oehm

06:52

I do the Independent cryptics fairly regularly, and I haven't done the Filbert from Sunday, so your rot-thirteening is appreciated. (The online interface is rubbish, so I usually print it out in the office and do it with a coffee when I come home from work. Today, I got a paper jam -- I'm in trouble already before reading the first clue.)

whiskrs

07:13

Is it just imagination? Folks here seem to be more cryptic by the instant.

Just lookin. And appreciatin.

Send me back into the corner. See you there, @oAlt.

oAlt

@MOehm :D

it's very possible you'll get the entries faster in general, though. I'm still an amateur after all

@whiskrs Indeed

M Oehm

Let's see. There's also that "wavelength" thing -- some days I'm on a setter's wavelength, others I'm not. And some days I'm just slow and can't even spot the obvious things.

whiskrs

07:49

To quote: "Does the cover reveal the book?"

oAlt

08:04

@MOehm understandable

Sphinx

08:41

0

Q: Double chess stalemate with 60 units

Inspired by Symmetrical Chess Position With No Legal Moves Can you arrange on a chessboard 18 kings, 6 rooks and 6 bishops of each colour (i.e. 60 units, leaving 4 empty squares) so that neither side has a legal move. Ignoring reflections, rotations and colour swaps, how many unique solutions are...

geometry chess

0

Q: Fit all pieces inside the square

Suppose you have n number of shapes and a square next to it. You have to determine whether the shapes fit inside the square without overlapping. What is a generic way to determine whether it's possible? Example:

geometry

Jafe

09:31

@oAlt i think the word you object to actually clues reversal, not anagramming - etymologically it means rot13(jvgu uvaqre cneg pbzvat orsber)

but yeah tough puzzle for sure

oAlt

10:51

@Jafe ah you're right

That wasn't my main objection, but thanks for clarifying what the clue actually meant. I'm not sure why rot13(V nffhzrq vg jnf na nantenz vaqvpngbe)...

Oh my gosh, I double checked the fifteensquared solution article for that crossword and it does already say it's a reversal, rot13(engure guna na nantenz)...... what the heck was my brain on?

Sphinx

13:40

-3

Q: Will we see a larger size on upcoming Iphone?

What do you guys think? iphone is getting bigger each year and its kind of weird see cell phone getting larger when the tech is getting smaller.

riddle mathematics knowledge

AncientSwordRage

14:43

@Jafe not always worth dragging a moderating discussion into main chat

bobble

15:59

If my flag gets declined (mod) or refuted (review) I'm going to end up bringing it to meta.

Have an SO analogy prepared already to get the point across

M Oehm

@oAlt Well, now that I've done (that is started and given up on) the Filbert, I can say that today was one of my slow days. I couldn't get into the puzzle at all and had only the three hidden answers in the NE after my first pass.

Later I tried to get a bit farther with access to an online dictionary, but that didn't really help. In the SE, my only entry was 26. Perhaps I was just caught on the wrong foot, but I didn't enjoy this at all and should have given up earlier.

(But I don't object to the first three letters in 1d; I think that's a fairly common equivalence in crosswords.)

oAlt

16:40

@MOehm Same, I got the hidden word clues early on. But I couldn't progress much without the aid of online resources. And even when using online resources I felt the urge to give up which I did.

(I think I spent significantly more time staring at my screen than actually solving the crossword... My brain was just empty most of the time)

M Oehm

Well, another day, another crossword.

Sphinx

16:59

0

Q: 10 people ,6 dine at a time. How many dinner event needs to be done so that each 3 person has dinned together?

Assume 10 people numbered 1-10 have to be invited for dinner events. Hotel can accommodate only 6 at a time. So they have planed to invite in batches as requirement is each person should have had dinner with other person. A person can be invited to more than 1 event. What is the minimum number of...

combinatorics

1

Q: Two mystical trees

Behold, the mystical Tree of B: Notice that every path from trunk to canopy forms a word. You should see 16 words (from left to right: BLOOM, BLOOD, BLOWN, BLOWS, BLAND, BLANK, BLASÉ, BLAST, BROOK, BROOM, BROWN, BROWS, BRAID, BRAIN, BRASH, BRASS). Once upon a time, the Tree of B had a sister...

wordplay geometry graph-theory jigsaw-puzzle topology

Chris Cudmore

17:27

Reviewing puzzling.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/53349

Obviously Recommend Deletion. Is this a "Thank You?"

I don't think it matters much in this case and I can get away with no comment needed.

But, it doesn't really fit "Comment on another post", which might be a request for information or otherwise valuable discussion that is out of place.

Zachiel

18:21

Hello! I've been thinking of a repeatable way to turn words into numbers, like if I was calculating a checksum. I'm curious to see how long it takes for you people to get all the passages right, but I wonder if it would be an on-topic question for the site.
The idea would be to let each partecipant tell me three words or sentences they want to see the chechsum of, and see who needs less hints. I have no idea if there's enough information to solve the problem this way.

(maybe this is a question for Meta?)

msh210

@Zachiel I can’t speak to topicality, but the format (a question that changed as people interact with it) wouldn’t work on Stack Exchange, as far as I can tell.

C4 hint: The answer comes etymologically from Gaelic.

Zachiel

I was thinking about adding the hints in ROT13 as a comment under answers. If that's still not OK, somebody wants to try? I would still have no idea where or how but... I'm open to ideas that don't involve any of us giving personal data away.

M Oehm

Yeah. The closest thing would be to provide a set of input words yourself and gradually expand it if the puzzle isn't solved. Once the puzzle is solved, the rule is public, however, so you cannot test this on several people.

The game as you describe it -- someone asks, you answer -- could perhaps be done in a dedicated chatroom. (But perhaps not. There used to be rather active chatrooms for certain games such as Codenames, but I don't know whether they are still active.)

Zachiel

I think, akin to the ball game (which I don't know under which name you know), you could prove success without telling the answar but by giving more correct examples.

(the balla game is the one where some people are in a circle and one has a ball, the ball gets passed around and in the end somene asks who has the ball. Which is very soon revealed to not always be the one that physically holds it)

But I do think it's not really good for SE's format, which is why I'm here asking about it :p

I might, on the other hand, test if a first set of hints is enough with a question, maybe some solvers will get it. Or I might discuss it with someone who's good at puzzles to see if the information I'll be giving is enough. Or... nah, I'll probably do nothing.

@MOehm Wait, I had missed this. This looks like it.

M Oehm

18:44

The "What is an X word?" puzzles in the word-property category often work that way. Sometimes a hint towards the pattern is given, sometimes, more "fodder" is added.

Puzzling Meta

0

Q: How to deal with old unanswered puzzles?

I have a puzzle that was posted back on June 22nd of this year. The first partial answer was posted a day later (6/23), and was last edited the day after that (6/24). The last comment on that answer was 6/25. The last activity on that post from someone other than me was 7/8, a comment asking for ...