You have 100 blue and 100 red points in the plane, no three of which lie on one line. Prove that you can connect all points in pairs of different colors
Connect the points in pairs of different colors so that the total length of all segments is minimal. If any two segments intersect, you can swap the two pairs among these four points and get a smaller total length.
This is a puzzle that is best played with friends and real dice on a table. The rules require one of the players to throw 5 dice at once, and then answer correctly “how many petals there are around the rose”. The procedure gets repeated until everyone has discovered the secret rules of the puzzle or has given up.
How many throws do you need in order to figure out this classic puzzle?
The roses are the middle dots on the dice, and the petals are the dots around them. Just count the number of all petals appearing on the five dice and you will get the answer. 1 -> 0, 2 -> 0, 3 -> 2, 4 -> 0, 5 - > 4, 6 -> 0.
“Puzzle at the End of the Book” is a very challenging puzzle from the 2017 MIT mystery hunt. The answer to this puzzle is a 6-letter word, related to a woman’s beauty. The solution is intricate and requires careful analysis of the book, some geeky references, and possibly a good amount of Google searching. Use the hints below if you need help with solving puzzle.
Source: MIT
Pay attention to the words in green. They form a riddle which needs to be answered.
Pay attention to the broken lines along the bubble speeches. Use an appropriate code to decode them.
Pay attention to the ship, the brick wall, the ladder, and the bucket. Use an appropriate code to decode them.
Pay attention to Grover’s arms. Use an appropriate code to decode them.
Pay attention to the fonts used for typing the words in red. Use their first letters to form a word.
Pay attention to the unusual words appearing in the text. Use parts of these words, combined with immediately preceding/succeeding parts of neighboring words, to get the names of six
The names of the six muppets have the same lengths as the six words discovered from the previous steps. See which letters overlap when you compare each muppet name with its corresponding word. Arrange these letters to get the final answer.
The answer to this puzzle is MAKEUP.
In order to get to it, first you must find 6 secret fantasy related words.
1. The green words on the pages of the book form the sentence Wooden ship turned around before understanding sea monster (SIX). “Wooden ship” = ARK, “turned around” -> KRA, “understanding” = KEN, so we get KRAKEN, which is a sea monster with six letters.
2. The broken lines along the speech bubbles can be decoded using Morse code to spell Lilith, Morrigan, Scarlet, or Queen of Pain. These female demons give the secret word SUCCUBUS.
3. The ship, the brick wall, the ladder, and the bucket contain four hidden Brail letters, which spell out the word HUMA.
4. Grover’s arms encode through semaphore the Inuit mythological creature QALUPALIK.
5. The word “Puzzle” is written in five different fonts – Times New Roman, Impact, Twentieth Century, Arial, Nosifer. The first letters of these fonts form the word TITAN.
6. Each page from 2 to 8 contains some unusual words. Part of these words, combined with immediately preceding/succeeding parts of neighboring ones, give the six Pokemons Sandshrew, Pinsir, Ekans, Clefairy, Tentacruel, Eevee, Rapidash. Their first letters form the secret word SPECTER.
The names of the six muppets on the last page are Barkley, Donmusic, Elmo, Kermit, Misspigy, Oscar. They perfectly match in terms of length with the six secret words which we found above. Also, each pair of name with secret word overlap in just one position, the six resulting letters are E, U, M, K, P, A. If we arrange these letters with respect to the length of their corresponding words, we get the final answer MAKEUP.
Place 8 queens on a chessboard, so that no two of them attack each other. For an extra challenge, make sure that no three of them lie on a straight line.
The original puzzle has 12 unique solutions, up to rotation and symmetry. With the additional restriction imposed, there is only one solution.
David Justice and Derek Jeter were professional baseball players. In 1997 they had the following conversation:
David: Did you know that in both 1995 and 1996 I had better batting averages than you?
Derek: No way, my batting average over the last two years was definitely higher than yours!
It turned out that both of them were right. How is it possible?
This is the so called Simpson’s paradox. The reason it occurred is that during 1996 both players had high averages and Derek Jeter had many more hits than David Justice. In 1996 both players had low averages and David Justice had many more hits than Derek Jeter. You can see their official statistics below.
| Player | 1995 | 1996 | 1995-1996 |
| Derek Jeter | 12/48 (.250) | 183/582 (.314) | 195/630 (.310) |
| David Justice | 104/411 (.253) | 45/140 (.321) | 149/551 (.270) |
Can you figure out which word is depicted by this rebus?
Each of the images in the first row depicts HAIR. Each of the images in the second row (except the second cell) depicts a BUG. Each of the images in the third row depicts ER.
The I from HAIR on the first row gets moved right after the B from BUG on the second row. Also, the U from BUG gets flipped upside down. Therefore, we get HARBINGER.
In an age of video games and noisy high-tech toys, Brainwright’s Manifold is a rare find. I got truly delighted by the idea of folding little papers into origami, trying to achieve some easy-to-understand task. The goal is simple – you start with an 8×8 paper which has 16 black, 16 white, and 32 empty squares printed on its front. You must make several folds so that the paper ends up as a 4×4 piece with all black squares on one side and all white squares on the other.
For just about $10 I was able to get a set of 100 puzzles, which translates into several hours of gameplay. The difficulty of the puzzles gradually increases, which makes Manifold appropriate for all ages. Despite my highly positive impressions, I have to point out several (minor) flaws. First, the glossy paper, despite its high quality, may not be the best choice for making origami. Second, there is too much space left at the edges of the papers, which may get in the way when one needs to make many folds in one puzzle. Finally, since the creases can’t be removed from the paper, it is unlikely that you’ll be able to solve the puzzles more than once.
If you want to try some sample puzzles from the set before buying it, you can print them from this PAGE.
Escape from the black hole to the upper right corner in this maze, created by Ben Uelk.
The solution is shown below.
There is a common 9-letter word in the English language, such that if you keep removing its letters one by one, the resulting 8 words are still valid. What is this word?
Remark: The removed letters do not need to be from the beginning or the end of the word.
The word is STARTLING -> STARTING -> STARING -> STRING -> STING -> SING -> SIN -> IN -> I.
There is an ancient invention still used today in some parts of the world which allows people to see through walls. What is it?
The answer is WINDOWS.
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