Goodbye Maze
Escape from START to END in this maze, created by Ben Uelk.
SOLUTION
The solution is shown below.
Category: Puzzles
Ben U. is the creator of the website Maze Dojo. Ben, an Indiana native, has been drawing mazes for fun since 2007 and his work has since been featured in print magazines, online publications, and music album artwork. Ben is currently working on a book of mazes of each U.S. State, due to be completed in 2019.
Rhombuses
A regular hexagon is split into small equilateral triangles and then the triangles are paired arbitrarily into rhombuses. Show that this results into three types of rhombuses based on orientation, with equal number of rhombuses from each type.
SOLUTION
Color the rhombuses based on their type and imagine the diagram represents a structure of small cubes arranged in a larger cube. If you look at the large cube from three different angles, you will see exactly the three types of rhombuses on the diagram.
Alternatively, the problem can be proven more rigorously by considering the three sets of non-intersecting broken lines connecting the pairs of opposite sides of the hexagon, as shown on the image below. The type of each rhombus is determined by the types of the broken lines passing through it. Therefore, there are n² rhombuses of each type, where n is the length of the hexagon’s sides.
Unravel the Rope
Is it true that for every closed curve in the plane, you can use a rope to recreate the layout, so that the rope can be untangled?
Said otherwise, you have to determine at each intersection point of the closed curve, which of the two parts goes over and which one goes under, so that there aren’t any knots in the resulting rope.
SOLUTION
Start from any point of the curve and keep moving along it, so that at each non-visited intersection you go over, until you get back to where you started from.
Blue and Red Points
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
SOLUTION
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.
Petals Around the Rose
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
“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.
Page 1 
Page 2 
Page 3 
Page 4 
Page 5 
Page 6 
Page 7 
Page 8 
Page 9
Source: MIT
HINT 1
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
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.
Eight Queens Puzzle
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.
Batting Averages
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.
| 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) |
Thoka’s Rebus 1
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.
Black Hole Sun
Escape from the black hole to the upper right corner in this maze, created by Ben Uelk.
SOLUTION
The solution is shown below.
