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?
There are 6 petals around the rose.
SOLUTION
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.
Pay attention to the words in green. They form a riddle which needs to be answered.
HINT 2
Pay attention to the broken lines along the bubble speeches. Use an appropriate code to decode them.
HINT 3
Pay attention to the ship, the brick wall, the ladder, and the bucket. Use an appropriate code to decode them.
HINT 4
Pay attention to Grover’s arms. Use an appropriate code to decode them.
HINT 5
Pay attention to the fonts used for typing the words in red. Use their first letters to form a word.
HINT 6
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 Pokemons. Use their first letters to form a word.
HINT 7
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.
SOLUTION
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.
SOLUTION
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?
SOLUTION
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.
Can you figure out which word is depicted by this rebus?
SOLUTION
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.
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.
SOLUTION
The word is STARTLING -> STARTING -> STARING -> STRING -> STING -> SING -> SIN -> IN -> I.
A bus driver was heading down a street in Colorado. He went right past a stop sign without stopping, turned left where there was a “no left turn” sign, and went the wrong way on a one-way street. Then he went on the left side of the road past a cop car. Yet, he didn’t break any traffic laws.
Why not?
SOLUTION
The bus driver was not driving his bus, he was walking.
A man was moving to a new house. He rented a moving truck, put all his belongings in it, and drove to his new place. He entered the garage with the truck and took all his belongings out of the truck. When he tried to exit the garage with the truck, he couldn’t. Why?
SOLUTION
The empty truck was just slightly taller than the garage door. When it was packed with items, the truck’s height got lower, so the man could enter the garage. Once the items were unpacked, the truck was once again taller than door, so it couldn’t get out.
Please note:
This action will also remove this member from your connections and send a report to the site admin.
Please allow a few minutes for this process to complete.
