In this series of articles, I’m writing about mathematical questions we don’t know the answer to – which haven’t yet been proven or disproven. This edition is a topical one, for Pancake Day (Shrove Tuesday, celebrated in the UK this year on 9th February). Some of the best mathematical teasers are those which originate in a…
Before Christmas, the benign megasurveillance bods at GCHQ released a set of festive puzzles, in the form of a Christmas card and associated website. An initial nonogram puzzle led to a sequence of increasingly fiendish teasers, and solvers of the final set of puzzles were invited to email in their answers, with the correctest winning a…
For about 40 minutes of this week’s episode of Relatively Prime (Number 5 of 8, already? Good heavens!), Samuel Hansen looks like he’s managed to escape from his shameful, borderline criminal, past in Las Vegas. But he’s pulled back in for one last job, which is a debacle, of course.
Puzzlebomb is a monthly puzzle compendium. Issue 50 of Puzzlebomb, for February 2012, can be found here: Puzzlebomb – Issue 50 – February 2016 The solutions to Issue 50 can be found here: Puzzlebomb – Issue 50 – February 2016 – Solutions Previous issues of Puzzlebomb, and their solutions, can be found at Puzzlebomb.co.uk.
On top of the usual disclosures, I should add that Dave Gale and I interviewed Samuel Hansen this week for our Wrong, But Useful podcast, which you might like to listen to for a deeper insight into Samuel’s brain. During the conversation, he warned me I wouldn’t like Episode 4 of the new Relatively Prime,…
Pythagoria is a puzzle game for PCs. It’s the same idea as Naoki Inaba’s Area Maze: you’re shown a geometric construction, not drawn to scale, and you have to work out a missing length or an area. Each puzzle is constructed so that it can be solved without ever dealing with fractions, though what exactly that means is…
In a remarkable example of us being psychic (or, what’s also known as ‘a coincidence’), our recently posted introduction to the game of Go has been made more topical by actual Go-related news. The game of Go has long been considered a difficult game for artificial intelligences to play – much more so than chess, which has plenty of…