Next week (on Friday, January 15), one of the most famous puzzle hunts of all time begins anew – the MIT Mystery Hunt! I would try to do justice to this story, but an article in Games Magazine sums it up far better than I could …
The image below is a panoramic 360-degree view of the city of Prague photographed from the top of the TV tower in the heart of the city. The image is a stunning 18 gigapixels (yes, you read that right) in size. Click on the image to go to the fully-navigable panoramic image viewer.
To test your mad searching skillz, the creator of the image has also challenged viewers to a contest! The contest is simple: just find these things in the image above:
1. blue hair
2. a heated floor under construction
3. somebody in their underwear
4. south end of the suicide bridge
5. lone pitbull
6. a bagel (or maybe it’s a donut)
7. exterior nudity
8. number 11 and 12, next to each other
9. a bus from a town between the rivers Krka and Kolpa
10. Sgraffito
11. “Pat & Mat†at work, up there
12. A driving range
13. A water tower being beautified
14. A “gentleman’s nightclubâ€
15. A clock that’s wrong
16. A sphere (no, NOT the spherical image itself)
17. A chairlift
18. A bulls-eye and cross-hairs
19. A female pink face on a window
20. A square and a triangle next to each other (in a field)
21. Where you go when you need fish food
22. Hippy czech flag
23. Helicopter
24 Where you can have a beer with Stelcer
25. A raven (or a type of crow anyway)
26. Pizza = mc squared
27 W‪here God can read the time from his chair in heaven‬
28. Vineyard
29. This building http://bit.ly/5jpfY1
30. This place http://www.360cities.net/image/treasure-hunt-clue-01
When you’ve found them all, just follow the contest rules for submitting your answers. There’s a $1,000 prize for the first person to submit the most correct answers. Of course, the contest ends at midnight tonight, so by the time you read this it will likely be over 
Good luck!
Now that the boys are out of school and my own two-week winter vacation has started, I can return to my long-neglected but highly important care of this site. Enjoy it while you can!
In looking for some holiday themed puzzles to share, I came across the SSQQ Christmas Carol Puzzle. Once you get past being freaked out just a little bit by the 1990s-style layout of the web page, there’s really good stuff going on here.
The premise is simple: puzzle constructor Rick Archer offers you 12 different images with 10 panels each. Each panel that references a popular Christmas carol. For instance, here’s the first image (click on the image for a larger version):
So, which 10 Christmas songs do these represent? Click here to find out!
[spoiler /Show Answers/ /Hide Answers/]
1. Jingle Bells
2. Walking in a Winter Wonderland
3. Santa Claus is Coming to Town
4. The First Noel (there’s no “L”)
5. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer
6. The Little Drummer Boy
7. I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas
8. I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In
9. What Child is This?
10. We Three Kings[/spoiler]
If you liked those puzzles, Rick has even more for you hidden away on his SSQQ Dance web site.
Happy Holidays everyone!
-eP
Here’s a puzzle a co-worker shared with me recently. See how you do with it!
Suppose you have five bags of gold coins. All of the coins weigh exactly 1 lb each except for all of the coins in one bag whose coins weigh 1 lb 1 oz each. The bags are unmarked, and there is no visible indication as to which bag holds which coins. The bags may contain different quantities of coins.
Suppose you have a scale on which you can make exactly one instantaneous measurement – put something on the scale, push the “Weigh” button, and you get a reading of the weight at the moment the button is pushed.
Using the scale, is it possible to identify which of the 5 bags contains the heavier coins with only a single measurement? If so, how?
[spoiler /Show Answer/ /Hide Answer/]On the scale, place one coin from the first bag, two coins from the second bag, three coins from the third bag, four coins from the fourth bag, and five coins from the fifth bag. When the weight is taken, the number of ounces will indicate which bag has the heavier coins. That is, if the weight is 15 lb 3 oz, then the third bag has the heavier coins.[/spoiler]
(I haven’t forgotten about you … I’ve just been really, really, really busy in a way that seems to be soaking up an awful lot of my personal time. Real Soon Now, I will be increasing my posting frequency here back to the levels I know you’ve all come to expect.)
There was a wonderful story about geocaching in the Sun-Sentinel this weekend, featuring a mention of Yours Truly. Check it out.
“The thing that interested me about painting Masquerade was, how could you make people look at those paintings…and look…and look…and look again. The puzzle–that was the way to do that.”
– Kit Williams
The children’s book Masquerade, published in 1979, tells the story of Jack Hare, commissioned by the Moon to carry a treasure to her love, the Sun. When Jack finally arrives at the Sun, he finds that he has lost the treasure.
The book is more than just a beautifully-illustrated children’s fairy tale – it is one of the most elaborate and elegant puzzles ever created. Kit Williams created the puzzle, the artwork, and the treasure itself – an 18-karat gold amulet encrusted with jewels and shaped like a hare.
The public was told that amulet was buried in a clay casket somewhere in the United Kingdom and that it was buried on public property which could be easily accessed. The book’s publication set off one of the most famous puzzle-solving contests in history – it sold more than one million copies.
In March 1982, Kit Williams announced that Ken Thomas had solved the puzzle, found the hare, and won the contest. (Despite announcement and accompanying news stories and photographs, puzzleheads in denial continued to search and to dig throughout the summer of 1982!)
But Williams had reservations about the find, which eventually proved to be correct. In 1988, the story broke that the real name of Ken Thomas was Dugald Thompson, who was a business associate of a man named John Guard. Guard’s girlfriend at the time was Veronica Robertson – a former live-in girlfriend of Kit Williams. Williams had told Robertson the general location of where he had hidden the treasure and how to find it.
Robertson pointed Guard in the right direction – she, Guard, and Thompson combed the area at night with metal detectors and shovels looking for it. Eventually, Guard drew a sketch of the final “solution” and prodded Thompson into sending it to Williams to verify, which he did. Thompson, disguised as Ken Thomas, went with Williams to unearth the golden hare.
After claiming the prize, Thompson placed the hare in a bank vault. In 1985, the hare was put up as collateral to fund a software company called Haresoft that ultimately went bankrupt. In December 1988, the hare was placed for auction by Sotheby’s where it sold to an anonymous private collector for £31,900 (approx US$60,000) – Williams himself bid on it to win it back but had to drop out at £6,000.
The whereabouts of the hare remained unknown for over 20 years. After hearing a radio interview with Williams, the owner of the hare agreed to be interviewed for a TV program produced by BBC Four in 2009. For the first time since the hare was unearthed, Williams was reunited with the hare (if only temporarily).
Masquerade was the forerunner of the armchair treasure hunt, which includes David Blaine’s Mysterious Stranger.
I have not spoiled any part of the Masquerade puzzles in this blog entry. But many descriptions of the solution exist on the internet. My favorite one is at bunnyears.net, which also includes links to all of the artwork in the book. Enjoy!
“Dear Editor This is the Zodiac Speaking …”
The evening of Friday, December 20, 1968, was the first date of Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday of Benicia, California. The couple planned to attend a Christmas concert at a nearby high school two or three blocks from Jensen’s home. Instead, they visited a friend and stopped at a local restaurant, then drove out Lake Herman Road. At about 10:15 p.m. Faraday parked his mother’s Rambler in a gravel turnout, which was a well-known lovers’ lane.
Shortly after 11 p.m., another car pulled into the turnout and parked beside them. The driver apparently got out with a pistol and ordered them out of the Rambler. Jensen exited first. When Faraday was halfway out, the man shot Faraday in the head. Fleeing, Jensen was gunned down twenty-eight feet from the car with five shots through her back. The man then drove off. Their bodies were found minutes later by Stella Borges, who lived nearby. The sheriff’s department investigated but found no leads.
On July 4, 1969, sometime around midnight, Darlene Ferrin and Michael Mageau were shot multiple times while parked at a golf course in Vallejo, four miles from where Jensen and Faraday were murdered. At 12:40 am, a man phoned the police department from a phone booth only a few blocks away from the police station and claimed responsibility for the attack as well as for the murders of Jensen and Farady.
On August 1, 1969, nearly identical letters were received by the Vallejo Times-Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Francisco Examiner in which the author took credit for the shootings. Each letter also included one-third of a 408-symbol cryptogram which the killer claimed contained his identity. The killer demanded they be printed on each paper’s front page or he would “cruse [sic] around all weekend killing lone people in the night then move on to kill again, until I end up with a dozen people over the weekend.” The threatened murders did not happen, and all three parts were eventually published.
On August 7, 1969, another letter was received at the San Francisco Examiner with the salutation “Dear Editor This is the Zodiac speaking”. It was the first time the killer had referred to himself with this name. In it, the Zodiac included details about the murders which had not been released to the public as well as a message to the police that when they cracked his code “they will have me”. On August 8, 1969, Donald and Bettye Harden of Salinas, California, cracked the 408-symbol cryptogram. No name appears in the decoded text.
From September 27 to October 11, 1969, the Zodiac murdered three more people. On November 8, 1969, the Zodiac mailed a card with another cryptogram consisting of 340 characters. The 340-character cipher has never been decoded.
Here’s a fun little brainteaser I saw that I thought I’d share with y’all:
Rearrange the letters of the four words in each set to form four new words that rhyme. For example, given the words BEARD, HERDS, DAIS, and ADDER, you would anagram them to spell BREAD, SHRED, SAID, and DREAD.
1. ONSET, NEWS, WRONG, HORNET
[spoiler /Show Answer/ /Hide Answer/]STONE, SEWN, GROWN, THRONE[/spoiler]
2. CURES, SOWER, SEVER, STEER
[spoiler /Show Answer/ /Hide Answer/]CURSE, WORSE, VERSE, TERSE[/spoiler]
3. DUNE, WELD, CURED, TWEEDS
[spoiler /Show Answer/ /Hide Answer/]NUDE, LEWD, CRUDE, STEWED[/spoiler]
4. SINGER, ASPEN, VINES, SPINAL
[spoiler /Show Answer/ /Hide Answer/]REIGNS, PANES, VEINS, PLAINS[/spoiler]
5. RANGED, ENLARDS, DACRON, DARNED
[spoiler /Show Answer/ /Hide Answer/]GANDER, SLANDER, CANDOR, DANDER[/spoiler]
6. BUSIER, SOLE, HOSES, WIVES
[spoiler /Show Answer/ /Hide Answer/]BRUISE, LOSE, SHOES, VIEWS[/spoiler]
I was very lucky to grow up during the Golden Age of Video Arcade Games. I always loved pinball machines since I was very young, so when video games became popular in the late 70s and early 80s, I was hooked.
My earliest video game memory is wandering away from my parents’ camper at the campground in Rainbow Springs State Park and heading up to the community center just to play Sea Wolf. I still remember where all of my favorite video games were located – arcades in shopping malls, single machines in convenience stores, games lining the walls of smoky pool halls, and more. I was never an expert at playing any of them in particular – I just loved the whole electronic gaming experience.
As I graduated from high school and joined The Real World(tm), coin-op video games began to be overtaken by the power of home machines. The Nintendo NES had just been released, followed by the Super NES, Sega Genesis, and more. The allure of the coin-op games began to fade.
To honor that bygone era, I’ve started a new series of geocaching puzzles called Arcade Classics. The Arcade Classics series is not a quest (such as my PS101 Series) – all of the puzzles are of the completely standalone solve-at-your-desk variety. They’re on the easyish end of the difficulty spectrum and will take solvers to interestingly relevant places I’ve discovered on my trips around town.
Enjoy!
-eP
PS: If you want to experience that coin-op goodness for yourself, you can do so right at home. The freeware application called the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, or MAME, lets you play all of those old games on your Windows computer at home.
PPS: If you like classic video games, you’ll LOVE these YouTube videos: Pong, Space Invaders, Pole Position, Tetris
I’m on a particular self-imposed geocaching quest – to complete the Florida-Style Alphabet Soup Challenge using nothing but puzzle caches.
I mentioned this quest to lorriebird and that I had no caches (neither found nor unfound) that I could use for the letters K or Z. Since she knew that I would be traveling to her area soon for an event cache, she graciously hid two appropriately-named puzzle caches for me to find – Ken(Ken) Moves to Naples and Zany Brainy Word Nerd (aka ZBWN).
I zipped through KenKen fairly quickly and took a cursory look at ZBWN. I tried a few ideas that have worked in other caches, but I couldn’t discover a pattern that made sense to me. I put it aside and went onto a few other caches, returning to ZWBN every now and then.
But as the weeks went by, I started to panic: “What if I don’t solve it before the event? Unless I figure it out, I’m going to be the laughing stock of every puzzlehead south of I-4!” And yet, other people seemed to be cracking it in mere seconds – every Found It log entry on ZBWN that claimed how easily each cacher solved it deflated my oversized ego more and more.
Finally, after the event cache and just as I was about to leave, one of the other cachers asked if he could give me a hint for ZBWN. I finally broke down and said yes, only to discover that I had the solution in front of me the entire time – it was one of the very first things I tried – and I was too blind to see it.
In my defense, I had a very good reason – it was because I’ve attempted too many puzzles like it in the past and they clouded my opinion of what the solution would be.
Below are 12 examples of just the sort of puzzle that kept me from solving ZBWN without a hint. I would strongly recommend that you solve ZBWN first before tackling these, or you will be as lost in the weeds as I was.
Good luck!
Each of the 12 sets of words below has a common denominator, some unusual factor that is shared by the six words in the set. It’s up to you to determine what that factor is and identify which one of the three words after the list has it, too.
For example, given SEXES, MOM, DEIFIED, LEVEL, POP, and REDDER, with choices DIVINED, ROTATOR, and STARTS, you’d pick ROTATOR: All the words are spelled the same forward and back.
For how many of the following sets can you get the last word?
1. SETTEE, RACCOON, EMBARRASS, APPELLATION, BASSOON, SUFFRAGETTE
a. BEDROOMÂ Â b. PROPELLERÂ Â c. EGGSHELL Â [spoiler /Show Answer/ /Hide Answer/]c. EGGSHELL – words with two pairs of double letters[/spoiler]
2. TEA, EYE, SEA, QUEUE, ARE, WHY
a. YOUÂ Â b. ATEÂ Â c. WEEÂ Â [spoiler /Show Answer/ /Hide Answer/]a. YOU – homophones of letters of the alphabet[/spoiler]
3. MUSEUM, EARLOBE, YEARLY, SEAMSTRESS, WILLOW, DOODAD
a. COCOONÂ Â b. ERASERÂ Â c. TABLETÂ Â [spoiler /Show Answer/ /Hide Answer/]c. TABLET – words that begin and end with the same letter[/spoiler]
4. YOUTH, THEMATIC, USHER, SHEIK, ITALICS, MEDIUM
a. THEATERÂ Â b. WEEVILÂ Â c. DOMESTICÂ Â [spoiler /Show Answer/ /Hide Answer/]b. WEEVIL – words beginning with a pronoun[/spoiler]
5. GIGGLING, REARRANGER, ASSESS, MINIMIZING, DIDDLED, PIZZAZZ
a. DEEDEDÂ Â b. INTERMITTENTÂ Â c. CANDIDACYÂ Â [spoiler /Show Answer/ /Hide Answer/]b. INTERMITTENT – words with one letter appearing four times[/spoiler]
6. REVILED, STRESSED, REPAID, STAR, DRAWER, PARTS
a. VILEÂ Â b. REGARDÂ Â c. STINKÂ Â [spoiler /Show Answer/ /Hide Answer/]c. STINK – words that can be reversed to spell other words[/spoiler]
7. PREVIEW, TALLOW, SELECTION, GOLDEN, BRAIDED, CLAMP
a. TRACINGÂ Â b. CASHEWÂ Â c. CONVERTÂ Â [spoiler /Show Answer/ /Hide Answer/]a. TRACING – words that become new words when the first letter is removed[/spoiler]
8. CIVIC, LIVID, MIX, MILL, VIVID, DILL
a. MIMICÂ Â b. LICITÂ Â c. MINIMÂ Â [spoiler /Show Answer/ /Hide Answer/]a. MIMIC – words consisting of letters that are Roman numerals[/spoiler]
9. BANANA, DEMONIC, FICKLE, HUMBUG, JABORANDI, LUCK
a. NEMESISÂ Â b. NUDISMÂ Â c. MEGATIONÂ Â [spoiler /Show Answer/ /Hide Answer/]b. NUDISM – words whose last letters immediately precede their first letters in the alphabet[/spoiler]
10. GEL, GROUP, PLACE, FIXED, RESOLUTE, ADJUST
a. USELESSÂ Â b. COLLECTIONÂ Â c. AFGHANÂ Â [spoiler /Show Answer/ /Hide Answer/]b. COLLECTION – synonyms of the word “set”[/spoiler]
11. RING, TOPS, MANATEE, WINDLESS, EARTH, ANGER
a. MATTERÂ Â b. TUNESÂ Â c. OUGHTÂ Â [spoiler /Show Answer/ /Hide Answer/]c. OUGHT – words that become new words when the last letter is moved to the front[/spoiler]
12. ACCEPT, BEGINS, ABHORS, CHINOS, BILLOW, EFFORT
a. ALMOSTÂ Â b. BEFOREÂ Â c. CENSORÂ Â [spoiler /Show Answer/ /Hide Answer/]a. ALMOST – words whose letters are in alphabetical order[/spoiler]
