Posted by andrew cooke at 9:01 PM on June 4, 2004 what else did people try that didn't work? :o/Īnyway, i'm curious how other people thought about this and how they went about solving it (which is why i've written so much). i guess from that i should/might have got to how it was restricted to particular values, but i suspect i''d have remained confused because i was thinking it had to be either the tops of the dice or connected with all the sides, since isolating it to a particular face would have made playing in a group difficult - i think that was just bad presentation in the article, in retrospect).Īnd then, eventually (after a few mins, i suppose), i remembered that the title was supposed to be significant, and then it was obvious. at first i looked for something in the numbers - particularly for an explanation of why the score was even (which seemed to imply some kind of invariant - all i could think of was that opposite sides of a die add to 7), not negative (so it was difficult to see how it could be subtraction) and apparently limited to quite small values. I don't have java installed, but looked at the "bill gates" article. Polar bears aren't exactly black, but it clicks more easily than rose petals. Oh, and I didn't get this one until I saw the polar bears tip. Say nothing but just give a questioning look, answer = 0. Toss the sticks down randomly without looking and still come up with an answer (corroborated by others). I took perhaps too much pleasure in trying to give away the answer to see who would get it. The answer was in fact the number of words the person had used to ask the question. The answer to the question had nothing to do with the sticks, though. One person would make a box of some sort by arranging sticks (pens, whatever) on the ground, then ask the players how many elephants the Princess Pat saw. In other news, I finally received my iPod Shuffle today (initial impressions: small and cool) and I intend to write something about my iBook breaking down last week and how that, combined with reading Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle put me in a peculiar state of mind.I used to play a game at summer camp involving elephants, a box, and a princess. Then again, it could well take much longer, so approach the puzzle at your own risk… I’m not going to reveal the answer here, but trust me – it’s not a cheat, and it is something you can figure out very quickly. In the end, it only took me about one or two minutes to figure it out which I was of course very pleased with. I used this simulator and it’s a good choice if you’re interested as well. Unfortunately today someone mentioned it, saying it’d taken her an hour to solve, and I duly was obliged to have a go myself. I knew that it could take me ages to work it out and I didn’t want to subject myself to that kind of mental torture. I wouldn’t entirely agree with that assessment because I think it has more to do with your temperament and backround than raw intelligence, but I do understand the reasoning.Īnyway, due to my aversion to traditional puzzles, I stayed away from Petals around the Rose. Bill Gates himself only figured it out after some hours, and it’s said that the more intelligent you are, the longer it takes. I won’t explain it here – read the previous link for a great article about it – but it’s a very simple brainteaser that takes some people about ten seconds to work out, and other people months of years. I’m not into cryptic crosswords either – it’s not what I do, and I believe that puzzle designing and puzzle solving are two very different things (although of course you do need an understanding of one to be any good at the other).Ī few months ago, I came across a puzzle called Petals around the Rose. Now, to be fair, sometimes I do find it interesting depending on the person and the puzzles, but generally with traditional puzzles I’m just not in the mood. This has lead to me getting all number of encrypted emails from friends and strangers under the assumption that I like nothing better than running ROT decoders and letter frequency analysers in my evenings. What I find amusing, and occasionally irritating, is that people assume that because I’m a puzzle designer, I must be amazing at solving puzzles. This is fine although I’m always a little awkward because I can’t tell them exactly what I’m doing – for one thing, it’d take too long. In any case, when I tell people that I’m a puzzle designer, they invariably get very excited and start asking me about all sorts of stuff, like ‘What kind of puzzles?’ and ‘That must be really fun!’ and so on. For various reasons this is not a great description but it works. In the About page on my weblog, it says that I am a puzzle designer.
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