This Friday we pose a word problem. A quote from Dr. Martin Luther King has been hidden in this picture. Start at the blue circle, and move horizontal or vertical until you have used all letters. The last symbol is the dot. The green squares represent blanks. No diagonal moves are allowed.
I found this type of puzzle in the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad
New puzzles are published at least twice a month on Friday. You can check your solution here.
Pluszle® is the trademarked name of a new type of number puzzle I encountered in the book/magazine shop at The Hague CS. I didnt want to buy it, but today my wife bought me a copy. The rules for the puzzle are elegantly simple. The grid is filled with numbers, and you have to cross out numbers till the sum of the remaining numbers equals the numbers in the right and bottom margins.
1) 5×5 nr 1*/*****
2) 5×5 nr 2**/*****
3) 6×6 nr 2**/*****
Priced at 4,95 euro and containing 375 puzzles it doesn’t sound like a bad deal. The main problem seems to me that the first part of the booklet contains 3×3 and 4×4 puzzles. In my humble opinion, these could have been omitted. Just this morning I was tweeting about education, automation of arithmetic, and differentiation in exercises for different students. Maybe I would have loved it to get puzzles like these at primary school as extra exercises.
The booklet is produced by Pluszle BV in Leusden, and outsider in the Dutch puzzle magazine world, which is dominated by Denksport and Sanders puzzels. Their website at http://www.pluszle.com mentions apps for the I-store and the android store, but I must admit I didn’t try the app.
Another, albeit smaller problem, is that the main variation is the size of the grids: the larger the more complex. It isn’t too difficult to create similar problems with multiplication:
4) 5×5 nr3*/*****
Another variation I can think of is a 4×4 grid with subtraction: cross out two numbers in every row and column so that the difference is the number in the right or bottom margin.
There is an even more puzzling form, but I think I reserve that for a subsequent post.
Now my words above may sound like a negative judgment, but I do not intend them to be that way. The larger sizes 6×6 and above, do offer a fair agree of difficulty.
Solution strategies
There are several solution strategies, here are the main ones:
(a) 8 can not be there, >5
(b) 3 can not be there, not in any combi
(c) 6 must be there, else you can not add up to 15
(d) all numbers must be there
The September issue of the Dutch magazine Quest came with a small origami puzzle booklet. It contains 8 puzzles. The puzzle in each case is to fold a square piece of paper, such as depicted below, in such a way that one side is black and the other side is white.
There is a book published by “The Incredible Company“. You can freely download a free pdf with 5 puzzles from there site. The book does not seem to mention an author, though I suspect the author is Jérôme Morin-Drouin. Play testers were two people named Caro and Felix.
To solve the puzzles below, print them, cut them and fold them such that the result is a sqiuare, white on one side and black on the other.
Puzzle 1*/*****
Puzzle 2*/*****
Puzzle 3*/*****
No solutions will be given.
Credits go to Quest for pointing out this puzzle type, to the incredible company for coming up with the idea and to my daughter Margreet for puzzle number 2 above. NUmbers 1 and 3 are my own work.
justpuzzles 