Category — Puzzles

“Toured the Burj in this U.A.E. city. They say it’s the tallest tower in the world; looked over the ledge and lost my lunch.”

This is the quintessential sort of clue you hear on the TV game show “Jeopardy!” It’s witty (the clue’s category is “Postcards From the Edge”), demands a large store of trivia and requires contestants to make confident, split-second decisions. This particular clue appeared in a mock version of the game in December, held in Hawthorne, N.Y. at one of I.B.M.’s research labs. Two contestants — Dorothy Gilmartin, a health teacher with her hair tied back in a ponytail, and Alison Kolani, a copy editor — furrowed their brows in concentration. Who would be the first to answer?

Neither, as it turned out. Both were beaten to the buzzer by the third combatant: Watson, a supercomputer … read the rest of the story by clicking on this link.

Are you smarter than a supercomputer? Find out by taking IBM’s Watson Trivia Challenge!

Blueprint for the "Onyx" level Dastardly Pathtag

I haven’t met many puzzle constructors who don’t want their puzzles to be solved.  Yes, there may be a few sadistic souls out there who revel in creating impossibly obscure puzzles.  But most of us are like authors or directors – we’ve poured our creative energies into something, and once it’s finished we want people to enjoy it.

I have a number of geocaches published in New York City, some of them traditional (coordinates posted on the geocaching.com site) and some of them puzzles (to be solved before the location is revealed).  It’s not hard to notice how much less attention the geo-puzzles receive.  In 2007 I published two caches in Central Park, less than half a mile apart.  One is a puzzle that has been found 4 times in the last six months.  The other is a traditional that has been found 316 times in the same time frame.

I talked about it with another local constructor in the area, childofatom.  How can we change this?  What could we as puzzle creators do to interest more people in solving puzzles?

We talked about borrowing the Puzzle Solving 101 concept.  We talked about hosting an educational seminar for new solvers.  Finally we took a cue from the growing popularity of Pathtags and batted around the idea of creating a special solver tag, available only to cachers who solve a number of the area’s geo-puzzles.  Pathtags are custom metal coins that can be collected and traded, and tracked online.  They’re similar to geocoins, but smaller (about the size of a quarter) and (importantly) much cheaper to produce.

We collected some of the best geo-puzzles in New York into a bookmark list of “Dastardly Puzzle Caches”.  We hashed out a “Dastardly” design and minted it in two finishes.  There were just over 30 puzzles, so we decided that one tag would be earned for solving 15, and another tag for hitting 30.  We picked out a pub and a date two weeks in the future.  We generated a list of people who had solved at least a handful of them and sent out an email telling folks when and where we’d be, and that we’d be handing out tags to any qualified solvers.

Then we sat back.

And watched the “Great Puzzle Solving Flood of 2010” start to roll in.

In the two weeks before we sent out our email, the Dastardly puzzles on our list collected a grand total of 16 finds between them.  In the two weeks afterward?  Over 100!  When we showed up to the pub it was crowded with eager geo-puzzle solvers happily introducing themselves to each other and swapping hints.  We quickly handed out tags and joined in the conversation.  One geocacher had published a puzzle that morning in honor of the gathering, using the pub’s coordinates as a starting point; another resolved to start writing his first NYC puzzle cache as soon as he got home.  We all promised to have another gathering soon where we could hand out more tags to people who had leveled up in that time.

The tags have created a spark in our community, and we’re building on it.  Interested in seeing if it might build interest in puzzles in your area?  Feel free to contact me through my geocaching.com profile and let us know if you’d like to adapt the tag design – there could easily be a whole series of “Dastardly” pathtags representing different puzzle communities all around the country (or around the world).

Trip Payne posted a new crossword on his site today called Something Different #3 (PDF AcrossLite). Don’t let the size fool you … the answers are a lot of fun and easier to get than you might think. 50-Across is my favorite entry.

Trip has a bunch of free puzzles on his web site – check them out here.

Puzzle cupcakes … can you name all 100 puzzles, video games, and board games depicted by the artwork on these cupcakes? (Yes, you read that correctly.) Click on the image for a closer look.

Today I have a few questions for you, Gentle Reader:

1. Are you really a puzzlehead?

2. Do you have £200?

3. Do you want to win £10,000?

If you answered “yes” to all of these questions, then the ISIS Platinum Pyramid Challenge is for you!

What is ISIS?

The ISIS puzzle was first made available to the public on July 7, 2006. ISIS is a spherical puzzle box made of precision-engineered anodized aluminum. The individual components of the puzzle box can be rotated or pressed.

The ISIS is not only beautiful (comes in many colors, even a custom patriotic USA theme) but also maddening – the solution to each one is unique (although the mechanism for obtaining the solution is common to all).

Unlocking the box reveals unique codes that can be redeemed for prizes (such as gold or silver coins) or to reveal further clues.

In 2008, the RAMISIS (or ISIS 2) puzzle was released. Instead of a sphere, RAMISIS is a pyramid with rotating layers – but the goal is similar. Find the right sequence for manipulating the device in order to access the codes inside.

What is the Platinum Pyramid Challenge?

On September 25, 2006, the Platinum Pyramid Challenge was announced. Solve all five ISIS puzzles, find the Platinum Pyramid, and win £10,000.

Good luck with this one, fellow puzzleheads!

I heard mention recently (on Ryan and Brian Do Crosswords) of a new quiz show on the BBC called Only Connect. The tag line is amazing: “A quiz show in which patience and lateral thinking are as vital as knowledge”. Here’s the links to the three segments published so far:

• Episode 1 Segments: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
• Play Only Connect Online

At first I was a bit put off by the show’s look and feel, mostly because I was expecting the typical array of flashing lights, catchy background music, and so forth. (I think the exact opposite of Only Connect would be something along the lines of Press Your Luck.) And the teams had me spooked – Oxford collegians vs. Cambridge librarians? And they use Greek letters as names for categories? (Is that a sigma or a delta?) I have no chance of answering anything!

Or so I thought. I watched the three clips, and I was surprisingly more successful at them than I expected. There were some questions that made me feel totally inept, but a few that I answered before either of the teams did.

The show’s premise is simple – find the common thread that ties four seemingly unrelated clues together. For instance, if the clues were: Rose, Sarah Jane, Tegan, and Ace, the correct answer would be Companions of Doctor Who.

Best quote of the show: “Everyone can do S-O-S in Morse Code, I hope? If not, we’re all going to hell in a hand cart.”

Today, we bring you the latest in our ongoing “Darn, I Wish I’d Thought of That” series. I’m sure you’ve seen a mechanical puzzle box at some point in your life – a small container, usually made of wood, that requires you to push, pull, slide, twist, tilt, or turn the box in various directions in order to open it. (My wife has a really clever one in the shape of a little house.)

I heard on the Podcacher Podcast today about an altogether new spin on the puzzle box – one the brings puzzle box out of the world of 18th century Japanese craftsmanship and into the modern technological era. Check it out here – Buzzle: The Morse Code Puzzle Box.

The box has a power outlet, a button, and two LED lights. In order to open the box, you have to play a game of hangman using Morse code. The box will pick a word at random from its dictionary, then buzz the number of letters in the word using Morse code. Using the button, you key in the Morse code of your guess for the first letter of the word. If you get it right, the green LED lights. If you get a letter that is elsewhere in the word, the yellow LED lights. And if the letter is nowhere in the word, the red LED lights. Once you’ve guessed a letter correctly, you move on to the next letter. Get ten letters wrong (10 red LEDs), and it’s game over – the box stays locked, and it picks a brand new word (which may have a different number of letters).

According to the builder, the inspiration was the Reverse Geocache puzzle – a box that won’t open until it arrives at the proper location, but will only tell you how far away the proper location is from where it currently lies.

So if you’ve got a soldering iron, a table saw, some sandpaper, and some engineering know-how, why not build your own puzzle box?

Discuss on the Puzzlehead forums

You say you’ve never heard of National Puzzle Day? Don’t be surprised. It’s just one of a long list of obscure holiday celebrations. Lists of these wacky holidays are readily available online.

Listed below are 300 obscure holidays in random order: 286 of them are real, 14 are fake. Find the fake ones, and you’ll be able to determine the coordinates of the final location of a geocache I placed to celebrate this holiday. Here’s how:

[Read more →]

I write trivia, word games and other puzzles for game shows, books, websites and magazines. While you’re here, solve some puzzles, read my bio and feel free to get in touch.
– Shawn Kennedy

If you like puzzles and but don’t like paying for them, look no further than to Puzzlement, a new web site by Shawn Kennedy that offers free daily and weekly puzzles.

Shawn Kennedy has written trivia and word games for six game shows. Each year, he invents puzzles for the Google U.S. Puzzle Championship and is a judge at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. For three summers, he helped Will Shortz edit the New York Times crossword. As a longtime contributor to Games and World of Puzzles magazines, Kennedy writes all types of teasers from word games and logic puzzles to 10-page puzzle mysteries. He has written games for CBS, ABC, National Public Radio, boxed calendars, newspaper syndicates and various websites. His books include Funny Cryptograms, Sip & Solve Word Hunts, Sexy Cryptograms, USA Today Sit & Solve Word Searches, Scratch & Play Mystery Word Puzzles, Cluesome, and Japanese-style logic puzzles for The Giant Book of Sudoku Presented by Will Shortz.

The web site for the 2010 MIT Mystery Hunt has finally been created. It includes a link to all of the puzzles as they were presented to the Hunt participants. No solutions have been posted yet, tho …