My in-laws in Singapore called up, asking for a solution to this puzzle. A short while later they called again to say that they’d solved it, but only after a long period of trial and error, asking me if there was a more systematic way.
Continue reading Making Tough Puzzles Easy (Or Less Tough, Anyway)
Puzzle : How many triangles can you see in the figure below?
When I cut an apple for my kids, I normally cut it into 6 pieces. I give the biggest piece to my younger son, since he insists on only eating one piece, but I want him to eat more apple.
Continue reading Apple Cutting Puzzle
I was using some software on my iPhone today, when this alert appeared :
Highway Jam is a game based loosely on the Traffic Jam Game found elsewhere on this site, and marketed by ThinkFun. Instead of solving individual 6×6 puzzle grids, Highway Jam puts your car at the end of a highway 300 squares long!
In my last blog post, I explained how to quickly and easily work out, say, the number of ways to get a 10 on three dice, just by multiplying together some polynomials. It doesn’t have to be real dice of course. The trick works just as well for spinners, balls in a hat, or computer random number generators.
Imagine you have two coins. One side is blank, and one has a single dot. You flip the coins. How many ways can you get 0 dots? How many ways can you get 1 dot? How many ways can you get 2 dots?
If you got answers like “1 way / 2 ways / 1 way” you got it right.
Some time ago, I posted a fractions puzzle involving flat bread. You can read about it here. Here’s the question – if I take a flat piece of bread, and give you half, then you give me back a quarter, then I give you back an eighth, and you give me back 1/16, and so on ad infinitum, how much of the original flat bread do I have?
I have four different things I can spread on my toast. If I want to taste them all, I need four slices of toast.
As a kid, I watched Sesame Street. One segment was on sharing. Bert has a cookie, and Ernie comes and asks him “will you share your cookie with me, Bert?”