Drizzo
Level: Master Delver

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If I'm right, I wont know 'til the 15th... or at least a few days anyway so someone else take up the puzzle posting slack...
of course plenty of people have failed miserably thinking for a while, so I'm probably just another lemming. Wish I'd been here for that board puzzle though, thought of both Schik and Koro's answers swiftly.

[Edited by Drizzo on 04-09-2004 at 10:47 PM GMT]

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Schik
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Drizzo wrote:
May Underwood
19th Letterends Row
Andover, England

If I'm right, I wont know 'til the 15th... or at least a few days anyway so someone else take up the puzzle posting slack...

Not to worry, you're as far off as everybody else.

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Drizzo
Level: Master Delver

Rank Points: 179
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At least mine makes entire sense, even if it's incorrect. I imagine a couple of postmasters might even bring this letter to the hapless resident at Letterends Row, who will be so excited to finally see something in their mailbox, after years of loneliness, but then finding the letter actually for May Underwood will plunge into a state of utter despair and cease to enjoy their tea.

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The_Red_Hawk
Level: Smitemaster
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Probably the correct part was "Street".

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Drizzo
Level: Master Delver

Rank Points: 179
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1 Largess End?


edit: and an anticlimactic 300th post! and I'm supposed to be on vacation from this place

[Edited by Drizzo on 04-11-2004 at 06:56 PM GMT]

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Schik
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To try to get this moving along, I'll say that Red Hawk was right, the correct part was "Street". So "S" somehow gets expanded to Number StreetName Street.

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agaricus5
Level: Smitemaster
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Schik wrote previously:

1 Comma Street? (he asked, clutching at straws)

How about 1 Blank Row for the street address?

No, and no. Not bad guesses, but there's not a blank row unless you're looking above or below the entire address, which would be a bit dodgy. 1 Comma Street isn't bad either, but why would "S" mean street? That wouldn't quite fit with the rest of the puzzle.

Schik just wrote:
To try to get this moving along, I'll say that Red Hawk was right, the correct part was "Street". So "S" somehow gets expanded to Number StreetName Street.

Ahem...

How naughty of you, Schik, to change your mind at the last minute, or have been misleading us into not thinking the correct part was correct.

I'll have a really crazy guess.

Is it...



[Edited by agaricus5 on 04-12-2004 at 10:51 PM GMT: Closed the unclosed secret tag]

[Edited by agaricus5 on 04-12-2004 at 10:51 PM GMT]

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Schik
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agaricus5 wrote:
How naughty of you, Schik, to change your mind at the last minute, or have been misleading us into not thinking the correct part was correct.

Hmm... I didn't think I was misleading anyone. Perhaps I could have been more clear - "S" by itself wouldn't be expanded to "Street" without some reasoning behind it - that would be like putting "W" instead of "Wood". I didn't intend to mislead, sorry if I did.

Nothing is a simple abbreviation in this puzzle.

As for the "S":

- Placement doesn't matter. End of line, after a comma, direction, anything like that. The "S" could be in the middle of an otherwise blank piece of paper and be decoded to the same thing I'm looking for.
- You know it's something something Street. Think backwards - if you had something something Street, how could you compress that down to just "S"?


[Edited by Schik on 04-12-2004 at 11:33 PM GMT: Added the secret hint]

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TripleM
Level: Smitemaster
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Is it something like

zzyzx
Level: Delver
Rank Points: 76
Registered: 02-02-2004
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How about this?

Schik
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

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TripleM is much closer than zzyzx, but 1 Letterof Street just sounds kinda... off. The solution I'm looking for sounds to me like a perfectly normal street name.

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The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
--Mahatma Gandhi

zzyzx
Level: Delver
Rank Points: 76
Registered: 02-02-2004
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For kicks:

May Underwood
1 Sin Street
Andover,
England

Get it? 1 S in street! Ok, going to sleep now.

Schik
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zzyzx wrote:
1 Sin Street

Hehe, actually not a bad guess - you guys are definitely getting close - you're using the right method, just not quite getting it yet. One more hint: The number is indeed 1.

So far, the close ones are:
1 Letterof Street
1 Sin Street

So we're left with "S" = 1 _______ Street.

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The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
--Mahatma Gandhi

zzyzx
Level: Delver
Rank Points: 76
Registered: 02-02-2004
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Why, Ms. Underwood has lived on all these streets:

1 Salone Street   ( "S" alone )
1 Snotreet Street ( "S", no "treet" )
1 Justice Street  ( Just "S" )
1 Spaces Street   ( "Space" "S" )
1 Gaps Street     ( "Gap" "S" )
1 Justans Street  ( Just An "S" )
1 Anis Street     ( An "S" )
1 Anus Street     ( An "S" )   (just a temporary residence)
1 Thefirstletterinthewordstreetcapitalized Street
  (ok, that's just nutty)

Why can't Ms. Underwood just live on Main Street like everybody else?!?

[Edited by zzyzx on 04-13-2004 at 04:08 PM GMT: more silliness]

Schik
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zzyzx wrote:

1 Salone Street   ( "S" alone )

1 Snotreet Street ( "S", no "treet" )

1 Justice Street  ( Just "S" )

1 Spaces Street   ( "Space" "S" )

1 Gaps Street     ( "Gap" "S" )

1 Justans Street  ( Just An "S" )

1 Anis Street     ( An "S" )

1 Anus Street     ( An "S" )   (just a temporary residence)

1 Thefirstletterinthewordstreetcapitalized Street

Here's why none of those are correct: I can see how you got "1 Salone" for example, but then you arbitrarily tacked Street on the end of it. Well, you did it because I said Street is right, but there's no other reasoning behind it.

The two that I said were close were close for that very reason - they didn't add street on arbitrarily. For example, "1 Letterof Street". Well, "S" is one letter of Street. Same for "1 Sin Street". There's one "S" in "Street". The answer I'm looking for is exactly along those lines, but soon I may have to just accept one of those two answers.

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The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
--Mahatma Gandhi

agaricus5
Level: Smitemaster
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Schik wrote:
The two that I said were close were close for that very reason - they didn't add street on arbitrarily. For example, "1 Letterof Street". Well, "S" is one letter of Street. Same for "1 Sin Street". There's one "S" in "Street". The answer I'm looking for is exactly along those lines, but soon I may have to just accept one of those two answers.

Is it then something to do with a preposition?

Like 1 Sixthof Street (1/6 of Street)?

Or even 1 Firstin Street ("S" is the first letter in Street)?

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Schik
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agaricus5 wrote:
Like 1 Sixthof Street (1/6 of Street)?

I'll end the suffering by giving it to you with that extremely close answer. What I was looking for was:

May Underwood
1 6th St.
Andover
England

Good job, all!

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--Mahatma Gandhi

zzyzx
Level: Delver
Rank Points: 76
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She moved there from "1 Sin Place"...
Looking forward to a new puzzler...

agaricus5
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Schik wrote:

agaricus5 wrote:
Like 1 Sixthof Street (1/6 of Street)?

I'll end the suffering by giving it to you with that extremely close answer. What I was looking for was:

May Underwood
1 6th St.
Andover
England

Good job, all!

Wow...

That was a puzzle.

Well done Schik.

Who gets the next puzzle, since lots of us made contributions towards the final answer?

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Schik
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agaricus5 wrote:
Who gets the next puzzle, since lots of us made contributions towards the final answer?

You do. Lots of people contributed, but you put it all together at the end.

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agaricus5
Level: Smitemaster
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I'm sorry, but I don't have time to post it right now (It's nearly 1 a.m. here in England) so you'll have to wait until tomorrow.

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agaricus5
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Right... Here it is:

A Dungeon Architect wants to build a giant chamber beneath the mountain of Teban for some unknown sinister reason.

The chamber will have a flat, perfectly horizontal and planar base, but the roof will be made so that top of the chamber's cross-section follows the shape of an arc of a circle. There will be several supporting pillars built in the chamber 27 feet from the edges, which will be 9 feet tall, and the chamber, he decides, will be 50 feet long, and its maximum height will be 10 feet.

The Dungeon Architect wishes to tile the floor. If one tile has a dimension of 1 foot by 1 foot, how many tiles will he need to tile the floor of this whole chamber completely? Assume that the pillars have a negligible width and length.

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gds
Level: Delver
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If I've understood the puzzle correctly then he'll neeed 4000 tiles (the width of the room is 80 feet)

agaricus5
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gds wrote:
If I've understood the puzzle correctly then he'll neeed 4000 tiles (the width of the room is 80 feet)

Correct. You're up!

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gds
Level: Delver
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File: puzzle.png (9.2 KB)
Downloaded 72 times.
License: Other
From: Unspecified

For those interested here is how I came up to the answer (see attached picture).

The roof is a portion of a circle of radius R. The highest point of the room is 10 feet from the floor and as it is on the circle at a distance R vertically from the centre of the circle.

The top of a pillar is 9 feet from the floor or 1 feet vertically from the top of the room, or (R-1) vertically from the centre of the circle. As it is also on the circle it is at a distance R from the centre of the circle. Horizontally, the top of the pillar is 27 feet from the edge of the room. If we call w the half width of the room, it is thus (w-27) feet away horizontally from the centre. Pythagorus thus gives:
R^2 = (R-1)^2 + (w-27)^2

The edge of the room is w feet horizontally from the centre of the circle and (R-10) vertically. It is also on the circle, thus R feet from the centre. Again applying Pythagorus:
R^2 = (R-10)^2 + w^2

It is then a matter of solving those two equations. One way to do it is to equate both right parts:
(R-1)^2 +(w-27)^2 = (R-10)^2 + w^2
which simplifies as:
w = (R+35)/3

Reinjecting this value in the second equation gives:
R^2 - 110*R + 2125 = 0
which solves as
R = 25 or R = 85, and thus w = 20 or w = 40.

As w must be greater than 27, then the half-width of the room is 40 feet.

Now, my puzzle:

What follows next ?
1
11
21
1211

krammer
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I've seen this one before, so I'll leave it for now as per the rules, and I don't have another puzzle anyway...

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DiMono
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wasn't there something about not putting up purely mathematical puzzles?

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Watcher
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DiMono wrote:
wasn't there something about not putting up purely mathematical puzzles?

Yep, but it's mainly to avoid puzzles like "If the number 2002^2002 is written as a sum of integers to the third power (not necessarily distinct), what is the smallest number of integers needed? Prove that no smaller number will suffice." In any case, if agaricus' puzzle about the tiled room is acceptable, then this is too.

I've also seen the puzzle, by the way, so I won't answer yet.

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Oneiromancer
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4. NEW RULE 1/1/04: The puzzle should be able to be solved by an average member of this board. So please, no puzzles whose solutions require you to write a program or solve some extremely obscure mathematical equation. Those aren't puzzles anymore, they are problems. We can't stop you from writing a program to solve a "normal" puzzle (although the spirit of the game is to solve the puzzles by hand), but I will have to now prohibit puzzles that require a programming solution or knowledge that is too esoteric or requires a lot of education in a particular field to solve.

This particular puzzle wasn't so difficult as to make me think that this rule should be invoked. Watcher has it about right, in what the rule was meant to cover.

Game on,


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eytanz
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Watcher wrote:

DiMono wrote:
wasn't there something about not putting up purely mathematical puzzles?

Yep, but it's mainly to avoid puzzles like "If the number 2002^2002 is written as a sum of integers to the third power (not necessarily distinct), what is the smallest number of integers needed? Prove that no smaller number will suffice." In any case, if agaricus' puzzle about the tiled room is acceptable, then this is too.

I've also seen the puzzle, by the way, so I won't answer yet.

I think Dimono was referring Argaricus's puzzle - solving it required skills I personally do not possess. I don't mind, as long as those don't become the norm.

The current puzzle - which I'm also familiar with and therefore will refrain from responding to - requires far more basic math skills than Argaricus's puzzle.

(for referrence, I won't attempt any puzzle that requires me to calculate the area of anything other than a rectangle. I'm quite proficient in some rather "mathy" skills (proof/model theory), but not in most things that are taught in highschool maths classes, which I forgot nearly as soon as I graduated).

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