6 + 5 = 9?

In the image above are six lines.  Can you add five new lines, different from the six original lines, to end up with nine?

A Strange Safari - Part 2

Earlier in the month we posted a puzzle about Professor Egghead's Australian safari where he, sadly, did not see any animals other than horses and people on his first day.  Luckily the professor did get a chance to see animals on his second day of safari.

After the second day Professor Egghead called me again and this time he was happy to announce that he had seen real wildlife while out riding the horses.  I asked him how many animals he had seen and, again, he didn't remember the exact number of all the animals, but he did remember that, including the horses and people from the day before, there were a total of 52 eyes and 74 legs.

If there were twice as many 4 legged dingoes as there were 2 legged ostriches, how many of each wild animal did the professor see?


(You'll have to be a bit creative to get the right answer to this one.)

Weights and Measures

A boy selling fruit has only 3 weights, but with them he can weigh any whole number of pounds between 1 and 13.

What is the measurement of each of his three weights?

Restoration - Logic Puzzle

This logic puzzle comes from the August 2003 Number 2 edition of Superb Variety Puzzles Plus Crosswords from Kappa Publishing Group.


Alexis has recently bought a charming Victorian house. She plans to do various projects over the next few months (August through December) to restore the house to its intended state, and has enlisted a different friend (including Golda) to help her with each task. Discover the month in which she will do each project and the friend who will help.

1. Alexis needs to remove the acoustic drop ceilings sometime before she installs period lighting fixtures.
2. She needs to take up the shag carpeting sometime before she refinishes the wood floors underneath.
3. Harry hasn't been enlisted to assist the month before Natasha.
4. The people who help Alexis remove the carpeting and wall paneling aren't of the same sex.
5. A woman will help her install the lighting fixtures.
6. Alexis will receive help from Kyle three months after she removes the wall paneling.
7. A man will help her in December.
8. Jed will help Alexis either the month before or the month after she refinishes the wood floors.

Binary Primes

The non-blog version of The Puzzle Page has published a new binary crossnumber puzzle.  This is similar to another binary crossnumber puzzle posted on this blog earlier.

 

As with the previous puzzle, the object of this one is to fill the 16 squares with the appropriate binary numbers.  If you need a refresher on how decimal numbers compare to binary numbers DEW Associates Corporation has a very nice number conversion chart on their website.

 

 

Across
  1.  4 Across - 4 Down.
  2.  A multiple of 3.
  3.  Same as 1 Down.
  4.  A prime number.

Down
  1.  A prime number.
  2.  Twice the value of 3 Across.
  3.  4 Across - 2 Down.
  4.  A prime number.

Hint: The three prime numbers (4 Across, 1 Down, and 4 Down) are unique.

 

 

 

If you like crossnumber puzzles consider these books from Amazon:

• 40 Cross-Number Puzzles: Addition & Subtraction
• 40 Cross-number Puzzles: Multiplication & Division (40 Cros-number Puzzles)
• Crossnumber Puzzles: Boosting Skills to Meet Assessment Goals (Crossnumber Puzzles, Grade 6: Extended Skills)
• Crossnumber Puzzles: 50 Crossnumber Puzzles With Solution Guides And Solutions

A Small Town Affair

Here's a puzzle that appeared in Creative Computing magazine back in 1974.

There is a small town of a few hundred inhabitants of which the following statements are surprisingly true:

1. Every man is a perfect logician and is aware that this is true of every other man in the town.
2. Every man in the town knows all about the behavior of every woman in the town, with the exception, if he is married, of his own wife. It is taboo for anyone to speak about a woman to her husband. 
3. It is an immutable custom (abhorrent to us maybe, but as inevitable as night following day to them) that, when a man discovers that his wife has been unfaithful, he takes her out into the town square that same night, and on the stroke of midnight shoots her. 
4. There are 40 unfaithful wives in town.

Now, life has been continuing its uneventful course for some time when, one fateful summer's day, June 1st actually, the Mayor summons all the townsmen to a meeting in the town hall. 'I am very sorry to have to tell you this,' he says, 'but there is an unfaithful wife in this town.' The meeting ends and the men disperse.

 

What, if anything, happens, and when? (NOT an easy problem.)



If you like these kinds of puzzles you may enjoy these:

Challenging Logic Puzzles (Mensa)

My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles (Math & Logic Puzzles)

 

Behind the Green Door

You are a captive in a far away land.  The king offers to set you free if you can pass the following test:

You are to be placed in a room with two doors.  Behind one door is a ferocious tiger, behind the other is your escape.  30 feet above each door is a window where a man is sitting.  One man always tells the truth, the other is an incessant liar.  You may ask only one question.

To ensure your safe passage, what should your question be?

An International Neighborhood

Five immigrant friends meet every Thursday to play poker. While they all live in the same neighborhood, each comes from a different country and each lives on a different street. They each favor a different beverage, keep a different kind of pet, have a different occupation, and each is a different age.

Use the following clues to see if you can find out who drinks the whiskey and who is the tailor.

1. The Italian drinks brandy.
2. The man who lives on Green St. has a canary.
3. The oldest man lives directly behind the grocer.
4. Western Ave. and Green St. run parallel to each other.
5. The Irish man's age is exactly between the oldest man and the Swede.
6. The man who drinks wine is 33 years old.
7. The man who lives on Main St. is exactly 11 years older than the cobbler.
8. The 38-year-old man keeps an iguana.
9. The man who has the dog is 6 years older than the man who has the fish.
10. The German is 55 years old.
11. The Russian lives directly behind the butcher.
12. The road the beer drinker lives on is perpendicular to the road the cat owner lives on.
13. The road the scotch drinker lives on crosses Elm St.
14. The baker lives on Main St.
15. The brandy drinker is 5 years older than the man who lives on Green St.
16. The youngest man lives on Elm St.
17. The age difference between the cat owner and the beer drinker is exactly the same as the age difference between the Italian and the man on Atlantic Avenue.
18. The age difference between the youngest and second to youngest is the same as the age difference between the man with the canary and the baker.
19. There is exactly 22 years difference between the youngest and oldest men.
20. The grocer drinks beer.

To help solve the puzzle, here is a map of the neighborhood showing where the houses of the five men are located.

The Twins' Birthdays

A young woman celebrated her birthday on the anniversary of her birth date. Two days later her twin sister celebrated her birthday on the anniversary of her birth date.

How can this be true?

Pigs in a Pen

How do you put nine pigs in four pens so that each pen contains an odd number of pigs?

Professor Egghead's Cuckoo Clock

On one of his trips to Switzerland Professor Egghead bought a handcrafted cuckoo clock that chimes on every hour and half hour mark. On whole hour marks the little birdie cuckoos once for each hour, and on half hour marks it cuckoos only once.

One night our favorite professor was wakened suddenly and realized that the clock had chimed but he did not know how many times. As he lay awake thinking about nothing in particular he heard the birdie cuckoo once and he started to wonder what time it was.

What is the longest amount of time Professor Egghead would have to lie awake before he knew for sure what time it was?

Five Men and Two Bridges

In the puzzle Crossing the Bridge, we met four people who needed to cross a bridge at night. In this puzzle there are five people who have to cross two sequential bridges at night. Like in the earlier puzzle, there are some hindrances:

The bridges can only support two people crossing at a time.

Each person has a different speed in which they can cross: 10 minutes, 7 minutes, 5 minutes, 2 minutes, and 1 minute.

They only have two flashlights to share between them. A pair of people can share one flashlight, which means there can be one pair of people on each of the two bridges at the same time.

If the short time it takes to get from the first bridge to the second can be ignored, what is the shortest amount of time it will take for all five people to cross both bridges?

What Color was the Bear?

A reader asks, "If a bear woke up, and began to walk, and every way he walked was south, what color was the bear and why?"

Hunters and Cabins

Here's a difficult Logic Puzzle that comes from a 1975 Creative Computing magazine. It isn't easy; it could swallow up a day of your time, even a week, but it will take more than an hour.

The following 15 clues are all you need to solve this Logic Problem:


1. There are five hunting cabins on a lake. Each cabin is a different color, and is inhabited by a man of a different nationality, each drinking a different kind of liquor, firing a different brand of shotgun shell, and shooting a different duck.

2. The Englishman lives in the red cabin.

3. The Pole shoots only bluebills.

4. Bourbon is drunk in the green cabin.

5. The Finn drinks beer.

6. The green cabin is immediately to the right (your right) of the brown cabin.

7. The hunter who uses Winchester shells shoots mallards.

8. Remington shells are shot in the yellow cabin.

9. Brandy is drunk in the middle cabin.

10. The Norwegian lives in the first cabin on the left.

11. The man who buys Federal shells lives in the cabin next to the cabin of the man who shoots red heads.

12. Remington shells are used in the cabin next to the cabin where canvasbacks are shot.

13. The hunter who shoots Western shells drinks gin.

14. The Irish man loads up with Peters shells.

15. The Norwegian lives next to the blue cabin.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to figure out who drinks Scotch and who shoots the teal.

I Like Ike Calendar

In 1952, Professor Egghead's father voted for Dwight Eisenhower for US President and had kept the calendar as a keepsake. Recently, Professor Egghead was going through some of his father's keepsakes and discoverd this calendar from 1952 and noticed that all the dates in 1952, which was a leap year, coincided exactly with the dates in 2008, which is also a leap year.

This made the professor wonder, how many different calendars would you need to have in order to represent every possible combination of yearly calendar?

Those Incredible Colored Socks

Professor Egghead woke up one morning and started dressing for a day in the office. He reached into his sock drawer and felt that there were four individual socks. He knew that two of those socks were black, one was white, and one was green. He grabbed two at random and put them on before leaving for work.

If one of the socks he was wearing was black, what is the probability that the other one was also black?

Crossing the Bridge

Four men must cross an old bridge that spans a raging river. I'm not sure, but it might be the same river that the Victorian couples and the man with the tiger and goat needed to cross as well. The bridge is old and rickety and can only support two men crossing at once. To make matters even worse, it is pitch black and they have only one flashlight to share between them, which means that after two men have crossed one must return with the flashlight. Each of the men has differing abilities and some take more time to cross than the others. The times it takes for each man to cross are: 1 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, and 10 minutes. When crossing in pairs, they can only cross as fast as the slowest man can go.

Can you find a way for all four men to cross in 17 minutes or less?

A Different Kind of Sudoku

Here's a sudoku challenge of a slightly different sort. In the 5x5 grid shown below, write (x,y) pairs, with x and y ranging from 1 to 5 inclusively, with the stipulation that x and y values cannot be repeated in any row, column, or diagonal.

For instance, if you write the (x,y) pair (1,3) in the top left cell, then you can not have any other pairs with an x value of 1 or a y value of 3 in the top row, the left-most column, or the main diagonal that runs from the top left to the bottom right.

This puzzle can be solved fairly quickly and is not quite as difficult as it may seem.


Click on the picture for a larger version

A Movie Quote Cryptogram

The following cryptogram is a quote from a popular movie. It's a very short quote, so it makes the cryptogram a bit more difficult to decypher. It is possible to crack the code as long as you work at it.

81 12 81 415. 50626 39 41 527.

Behind the Green Door

You are a captive in a far away land. The king offers you your freedom if you can pass the following test:

You are placed in a room with two doors. Behind one door is a ferocious tiger, behind the other is your escape. 30 feet above each door is a window where a man is sitting. One man always tells the truth, the other is a constant liar. You may ask only one question.

What one question do you ask and to which man do you pose that question so that you are assured to reach freedom and not be eaten by the tiger. Remember; you don't know which man is honest and which one lies.