Tag: puzzles
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Wrote note for GC9F5YC GIs in Letcombe
This checkin to GC9F5YC GIs in Letcombe reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. Found the clues and solved the coordinates, but I've JUST walked past the final location a while ago and don't feel like doubling back today!
A=How many letters in the word underneath Knoxville?
B=A*2
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FlipFlop Solitaire's Deck-Generation Secret
I enjoy a mobile game called FlipFlop Solitaire, which provides a few thousand pre-seeded decks that are guaranteed "winnable". This blew my mind for a little while - how can you be sure that these shuffles are all winnable? But then I worked out a way to achieve exactly that result... by thinking in reverse!
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Did I Cheat?
I solved a puzzle geocache in an unconventional way: by writing a program to permute all the possible solutions and check them for me. Was that cheating? I can see arguments either way...
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Chain Words
I've been enjoying playing Chain Words, from eclectech, intermittently, since it came out in November. If you've not given it a go yet, and you like a word game that's a bit different, you should try it!
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DOCTYPE
I received my copy of DOCTYPE magazine, a genuine 'type this program in and run it'-style programming magazine but for a modern world, and enjoyed writing, debugging, playing, and then considering refining Stuart Langridge's puzzle The Nine Pyramids.
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Impossible Countdown
Are there any tilesets that can be legitimately drawn during Countdown's Letters Game for which there exist no English words? I began writing a program to try to find the worst possible deals, but then found a series of heuristic shortcuts that meant I could find one with just a few minutes thought... because it turns out computers aren't always the right answer!
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Made a little progress on the game idea I'd been experimenting with. The idea is to do find a series of orthogonal (like a rook in chess!) moves that land on every square exactly once each before returning to the start, dodging walls and jumping pits.
But the squares have arrows (limiting the direction you can move out of them) or numbers (specifying the distance you must travel from them).
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Four sample puzzles, one of them solved.
Every board is solvable, starting from any square. There'll be a playable version to use on your device (with helpful features like "undo") sometime soon, but for now you can give them a go by hand, if you like this kind of puzzle!
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Possibly I'm a little late for the "casual daily puzzle game" party. (Did Wordle already get invented in this timeline; I forget?)
I think there's something in an idea I've been toying with. Bring on the weekend, when I can throw some brainpower at the frontend code!
![Full image of A notebook is held in front of terminal output. The terminal begins with 'Start position: [0,4]' and then shows a series of 5×5 grids containing numbers: one, labelled 'Route:', shows random grid of the numbers 0 through 24; the second, labelled 'Puzzle:', contains 1s, 2s, and 3s, corresponding perhaps to the orthagonal distances between consecutive numbers from the first grid; the third, whose title is obscured by the notebook, shows the same thing again but with 'walls' drawn in ASCII art between some of the numbers. The notebook in front contains hand-drawn sketches of similar grids with arrows "jumping" around between them.](https://bcdn.danq.me/_q26u/2025/03/20250313_100059-scaled.jpg)
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A notebook is held in front of terminal output. The terminal begins with 'Start position: [0,4]' and then shows a series of 5×5 grids containing numbers: one, labelled 'Route:', shows random grid of the numbers 0 through 24; the second, labelled 'Puzzle:', contains 1s, 2s, and 3s, corresponding perhaps to the orthagonal distances between consecutive numbers from the first grid; the third, whose title is obscured by the notebook, shows the same thing again but with 'walls' drawn in ASCII art between some of the numbers. The notebook in front contains hand-drawn sketches of similar grids with arrows "jumping" around between them.
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AI vs The Expert
Inspired by an 11-year old comedy sketch, I asked a GenAI to solve an unsolvable programming problem... and (for at least some models) it failed in exactly the way I anticipated: claiming to be able to solve it and delivering code that just... didn't. What does this teach us about AI trustworthiness for problems that might be solvable, but for which the human operator doesn't have sufficient comprehension to verify?
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Monday Punday
For almost a year I've been slowly working my way through the archives of Monday Punday, a webcomic which challenges the reader to solve picture-based pun puzzles. Give it a go!
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Quickly Solving JigsawExplorer Puzzles
A fellow jigsaw-hating geocacher, familiar with my work on Jigidi, challenged me to find a way to bypass JigsawExplorer too. Here's what I came up with...
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Woodward Draw
Over the course of three days, I completed excellent 4-letter-word-puzzle-game Woodward Draw, and I think you should give it a go too.
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The Miracle Sudoku
Three years after first enjoying it, I re-watched this spectacular video of... a man playing sudoku. It's way better than it sounds, I promise!
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Solving Jigidi... Again
The Jigidi jigsaw solver I wrote a year and a half ago stopped working, so I made another one (it's not as good).
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STAR T/W R/A E/R K/S
Dan shares and comments on an excellent crossword puzzle.