Tag Archives: Puzzles

Crossnumbers

Numbers,

Crosswords are among the worlds most printed and devised puzzles. And though they are puzzles with words, they are not language puzzles and they can be fairly easily generated once you have a large dictionary in electronic form available.

But Crosswords are so common place I have thus far avoided them in this blog. There are several number variants however, and the one presented here is geared towards math buffs.

Crossnumbers math buffs exercise

Horizontal Vertical
1 square with identical first and third digit
3 fibonacci number
5 perfect number
7 number of cards in bridge
9 happy number
10 catalan number
11 monodigit number
12 lucas number
14 happy number
16 narcistic number
18 circular prime
19 fibonacci number		 1 factorial number
2 prime number
3 fourth power
4 catalan number
6 multiple of 11
8 third power
9 perfect number
12 third power and a square
13 fibonnacci number
15 triangular number
16 fermat prime
17 square

You can check your solution here

Strong drinks

Cryptarithm, Puzzles,

1) Drink**
This weeks puzzle is a cryptarithm, one of the type of a non unique list:

 BEER
 BEER
 BEER
 WINE
 WINE
 WINE
WATER
WATER
WATER
-----+
DRINK

Solve this with A less then B.

It goes without saying that I strongly advice you not to drink any beer or wine when solving this puzzle. And while we’re on the topic: though a glass of wine is reported to be healthy, be aware that any large amount of alcohol destroys a number of braincells, and that brains which are not full grown may suffer more damage from alcohol than full grown brains.

(Solution: 60)

Letterboggle

Pencil and Paper puzzles, Spatial reasoning

This puzzle type has nothing to do with the game “letter boggle”.

As usual, the rules are simple:
– fill in the entire alphabet, using every letter exactly once;
– consecutive letters are adjacent horizontally, vertically or diagonally;
– a letter in the border means that the letter appears in the indicated diagonal, row or column;

In the following puzzle, some letters are given to help you start:
1) Letterboggle*
Letter boggle 2013-12-30 nr 1 - exercise

I found this type of puzzle in “PUZZEL”, a year-end addendum to the newspaper reformatorisch dagblad. It had 2 puzzles of this type, copyrighted M. Balmaekers, though Mr. Balmaekers used a 5×5 square and dismissed the letter Q. I intend to have more puzzles like this in one of the upcoming e-books.

I would like to encourage you to solve this puzzle on your own. It will increase your self confidence, while looking up the answer will lower your self esteenm.>When you have solved this puzzle, you can check your solution here

You are welcome to remark on the puzzles, and I love it when you comment variations, state if they are too easy or too difficult, or simply your solution times. Please do not state the solutions – it spoils the fun for others. I usually make the solution available after one or two weeks through a link.