Manifold is a brilliant puzzle invented by Jerome Morin-Drouin. Based on the origami principle, the goal of Manifold is to fold the printed paper several times, so that eventually you will end up with a 4 × 4 square which is white on one side and black on the other. The Manifolds here are provided by The Incredible Company and are part of their Manifold game which contains a total of 100 puzzles. Click the images, download them, print them, and solve the puzzles.
Prepare a piece of paper with dimensions 2×4, then fold it four times to form 8 squares. Write on the squares in the top row the numbers 1, 8, 7, 4, and write on the squares in the bottom row the numbers 2, 3, 6, 5.
Now your task is to fold the piece of paper several times, so that the squares end up on top of each other, with the numbers appearing in ascending order top to bottom, and 1 face up.
Once you do this, try again with numbers 1, 8, 2, 7 on the top row, and 4, 5, 3, 6 on the bottom row.
A woman shoots her husband, then holds him under water for five minutes, then hangs him, and finally, they enjoy a romantic dinner together. How is this possible?
SOLUTION
The woman takes a picture of her husband and develops it in a dark room.
UPDATE: The game Brandscape is not active anymore.
Here is a nice pop-culture puzzle quiz by our friends at Funding Circle. They have created a colorful painting with 60 hidden references to famous brands in it, which you must find and recognize correctly. The puzzle is fiendishly hard but really fun to solve. To play it, just click the image below. Good luck!
A chess king starts on one cell of a chessboard and takes a non-intersecting tour, passing through each square once, and ending up on the initial square. Show that the king has made no more than 36 diagonal moves.
SOLUTION
The king must visit the 28 perimeter squares in order; otherwise, he will create a portion of the board which is inaccessible for him. However, he can not travel from one square to a neighboring one using only diagonal moves. Therefore, he must make at least 28 horizontal/vertical moves and at most 64 – 28 = 36 diagonal moves.
Our first puzzle contest is officially over. Congratulations to the winner Kuan L.! Also, special thanks to Rajesh Kumar, Johann Sturcz, Dave Phillips, P. A. Heuser, as well as ThinkFun and Dover Books for contributing puzzles.
Time for work – 1 hour
1. Connections
Examine the diagram and find which pairs of letters are connected with each other.
Detective Roy Omoshi (upper right) is chasing a dangerous criminal (lower left) through a destroyed maze. King Kong is trying to help Roy by putting together all the pieces of the maze so that the detective can safely traverse it. Analyze the picture and find the sequence of pieces Roy Omoshi will pass through before he catches the criminal. Some pieces (#1, #7, #8) consist of multiple horizontal segments, so it is possible that the detective visits them multiple times.
Enter by the bottom red path and exit from the top of the maze. You may retrace your path, but you may not make a U-turn on a pathway. You must follow the paths in the order red, blue, yellow, and then red, blue, yellow again, changing color at the white squares.
The starting and ending positions of 7 chess pieces are shown on the board. Find the trajectories of the pieces, if you know that they do not overlap and completely cover the board. Notes: The pieces can not backtrack. Two trajectories can intersect diagonally but can not pass through the same square. Only the Knight’s has a discontinuous trajectory.
Author – Puzzle Prime
6. Sheep and Wolves
A shepherd takes his two sheep every day to a 7×7 lawn, so that they can eat the fresh grass there. However, there are five wolves on the lawn which are preying on the poor sheep. The shepherd decided to build a closed, non-intersecting fence around the sheep, so that all wolves end up on the outside. He planned the shape of the fence carefully and installed several signs showing the number of fence pieces around the corresponding cells. Can you figure out the shape of the fence the shepherd is going to build?
In order to see that 8 is the minimum number of moves, notice that Black could only move rooks and knights, and therefore he has made an even number of moves. This implies that White has made an odd number of moves, excluding the pawn on f3. This is possible only if he has placed his king on a white cell at some point and then returned it back to e1, which would take at least 8 moves.
