A Self-Descriptive Crossword Puzzle

From Lee Sallows:

Can you complete the ‘self-descriptive crossword puzzle’ at left below? As in the solution to a similar puzzle seen at right, each of its 13 entries, 6 horizontal, 7 vertical, consists of an English number name folowed by a space followed by a distinct letter. The number preceding each letter describes the total number of occurrences of the letter in the completed puzzle. Hence, in the example, E occurs thirteen times, G only once, and so on, as readers can check. Note that the self-description is complete; every distinct letter is counted.

Though far from easy, the self-descriptive property of the crossword enables its solution to be inferred from its empty grid using reasoning based on orthography only.

sallows self-descriptive crossword

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Snow Manipulation

https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/News-Highlights/Article/Article/1624723/january-2018-puzzle-periodical-snow-manipulation/

A puzzle by James M., an operations researcher at the National Security Agency:

Frosty the Snowman wants to create a small snowman friend for himself. The new snowman needs a base, torso, and a head, all three of which should be spheres. The torso should be no larger than the base and the head should be no larger than the torso.

For building material, Frosty has a spherical snowball with a 6-inch radius. Since Frosty likes to keep things simple, he also wants the radius of each of the three pieces to be a positive integer. Can Frosty accomplish this?

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“The Unlucky Hatter”

From The Book of 500 Curious Puzzles, 1859:

A blackleg passing through a town in Ohio, bought a hat for $8 and gave in payment a $50 bill. The hatter called on a merchant near by, who changed the note for him, and the blackleg having received his $42 change went his way. The next day the merchant discovered the note to be a counterfeit, and called upon the hatter, who was compelled forthwith to borrow $50 of another friend to redeem it with; but on turning to search for the blackleg he had left town, so that the note was useless on the hatter’s hands. The question is, what did he lose — was it $50 besides the hat, or was it $50 including the hat?

This is not so much a puzzle as a perplexity. “[I]n almost every case the first impression is, that the hatter lost $50 besides the hat, though it is evident he was paid for the hat, and had he kept the $8 he needed only to have borrowed $42 additional to redeem the note.”

The Unheard Islander

A puzzle by Edward J. Barbeau, from the February 2007 issue of Crux Mathematicorum:

A certain familiar island is inhabited by knights, who can only speak the truth, and knaves, who can only lie. One day a visitor meets three inhabitants, A, B, and C. The visitor asked, “How many knights are there among you three?”

A gave an answer, which the visitor didn’t hear. When the visitor asked B what A had said, B replied, “A said that there is one knight among us.” At this C said, “Don’t believe B. He is lying.”

What are B and C?

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The Six Submarines

A puzzle by Henry Dudeney:

If five submarines, sunk on the same day, all went down at the same spot where another had previously been sunk, how might they all lie at rest so that every one of the six U-boats should touch every other one? To simplify we will say, place six ordinary wooden matches so that every match shall touch every other match. No bending or breaking allowed.

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More Self-Description

From reader Ian Duff:

“It is easy to establish that the self-descriptive phrase ‘this phrase contains thirty-five letters’ is the only such one with a correct count. No equivalent is possible in French or German, but in Italian questa frase contiene XX lettere, where XX is a number in word form, again has only one solution.”

What is it?

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Hex Wrench

https://archive.org/details/planegeo/page/n409/mode/2up?view=theater

A problem by Russian mathematician Viktor Prasolov: This hexagon has been divided into black and white triangles so that any two triangles either have a common side (in which case they’re painted different colors) or a common vertex or they have no points in common, and each side of the hexagon is a side of one of the black triangles. Prove that no such partition exists for a 10-gon.

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A Path-Making Game

Alice and Bob are playing a game. An n×n checkerboard lies between them. Alice begins by marking a corner square, and thereafter the two of them take turns marking squares; each one they choose must be adjacent orthogonally to the last one chosen, so together they’re making a path around the board. When the path can’t continue (because no unmarked adjacent square is available), then the player who moved last wins. For which n can Alice devise a winning strategy? What if she has to start by marking a square adjacent to a corner, rather than the corner itself?

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The Bebington Puzzle Stones

bebington puzzle stones

Visiting England’s Wirral Peninsula in 1853, Nathaniel Hawthorne came upon a queer battlemented house in the town of Bebington, “quite a novel symbol of decay and neglect,” “probably the whim of some half-crazy person.” “On the wall, close to the street, there were certain eccentric inscriptions cut into slabs of stone, but I could make no sense of them.”

The crazy person was resident Thomas Francis, and the inscriptions had apparently been commissioned to bemuse and entertain passersby. They offer three puzzles. The first presents the image of an inn, The Two Crowns, and the following riddle:

“My name And sign is thirty Shillings just, and he that will tell My Name Shall have a Quart on trust, for why is not Five the Fourth Part of Twenty the Same in All Cases?”

This was easier to guess at the time of its inscription. The landlord of the Two Crowns was Mark Noble, the old English coin known as the noble was worth 6 shillings and eightpence, the mark was worth 13 shillings and fourpence, and two crowns were worth 10 shillings. Together these values total 30 shillings.

The second puzzle is more straightforward: “Subtract 45 From 45 That 45 May Remain.” This seems to refer to the following mathematical curiosity:

  987654321
- 123456789
-----------
  864197532

Each of these figures comprises the digits 1 to 9, so all have the same digit sum: 45.

The last puzzle is the easiest:

  AR
    UBB
I
  NGS
TONEF
  ORAS
 SE
S

Read this straight through and you get A RUBBING STONE FOR ASSES — possibly a comment by Francis on the loiterers who would gather outside his home.

The house was demolished in the 1960s, but the stones can be seen today in the foyer of the library at the Bebington civic center.