I'm trading puzzles with grandpascorpion. I chose to do his Slitherlink variant, OctaLink, and as you may guess, I themed it on the octagonal stop sign.



In normal Slitherlink, some squares have numbers ranging from 0 to 3 that tell how many of their edges are part of a loop. OctaLink adds octagons with numbers from 0 to 7 with the same meaning. And to be sure, shapes along the grid edge always have the same number of edges as the internal shapes; the cell with the green 6, for example, has five internal edges and three (not 1) external edges.

Happy 4th of July!

This week, I played matchmaker between Erich Friedman and Alexandre Muñiz. (These links contain some necessary background on weightominoes and sumominoes, respectively.) As sort of a thank-you, Alexandre sent me a problem reminiscent of Erich's extension tilings (problem 5) last month.

Is there a n-omino for which all the weightominoes with weight n+1 formed from it can tile a rectangle with equal weight in each square?

To be clear, a basic n-omino has weight 1 in each square cell. Let's define a "weight-extension" as a polyomino where 1 of its cells weighs 2 and the rest of its cells weigh 1. Then there may be up to n weight-extensions of a given n-omino (less if the original is symmetrical), and the problem is to cover a rectangle with these weight-extensions so that every square weighs the same.

Of course, I don't know whether there's an answer for any polyomino (except for the trivial 1x1x2 for the monomino). But my intuition suggests that an asymmetrical octomino with extensions of weight 9 would be a good entry point.

I may not be old enough to remember the good old days, and there probably weren't that many, but I get nostalgic for when the stock market meant something to people. I mean, money makes the world go 'round, don't get me wrong, but recently money's made the world go pear-shaped.

See, markets are places to buy and sell goods, and the stock market used to be similar, except it funded the production of those goods. More recently, it became entirely about making money and thus the collapse. You can't just hedge your funds and siphon out cash indefinitely.

The problem is based in human nature, though it manifests in money's fungibility. What that means is that people get greedy for money precisely because it lacks inherent meaning. So what's the answer?

An incomplete answer is that folks should invest only in things they have interest in. This is one of the assumptions Adam Smith made in conceptualizing the Invisible Hand of the Marketplace. The theory is that popular businesses will automatically survive; this theory doesn't take into account the possibility of impossible or unsustainable models, like making money from nothing in a zero-sum game. But please keep in mind that inasmuch as we can determine what's "right," it won't always match what's popular.

EDIT, Disclaimer: I have not read Smith, and I really should have.

Introducing Charles Babbage and his Amazing Calculating Machines!



This is a cryptic KenKen. Each digit is replaced uniformly by a different letter from A-K (skipping I). If you choose to print out the puzzle to solve it, you can write the decrypted clue numbers to the right of the operations.

Edit: To be sure, the spectrum (the numbers in each row/column of the Latin square) is indeed 1-7.

This one gave me a bit of trouble in the making. I finally got the right dividend in the shower.

    _    PA
WASH)PLASMA
     RWYWR
      ARSAA
      LAWUR
       PLLS

This post is obviously late. Good thing I'm not paid by the blog. Except that I'm not paid. Unless you count scholarships, or Social Security.

Anyway, TV waited until Summer to stop making new episodes. Though it shouldn't have mattered, since "Chuck," "Heroes," and now even "Numb3rs" keep web archives of recent episodes. They're just so satisfyingly addicting. The newspaper may be in trouble from the Internet, but TV is safe as long as it has an obvious, earlier schedule. (Also, radio news might remain viable even if blogs supplant TV news, so "The Daily Show" isn't going anywhere.)

Both "Chuck" and "Heroes" recovered well with their season finales, though of course in different ways. "Numb3rs" didn't have much to recover from, so it was merely great and not redemptive.
( Semi-spoilers; statute of limitations may have run out, but they're longish )

I should do these kinds of posts more often. E-mail posts of puzzles I can do in words or ASCII.

     _     EM
CZECH)BOHEMIA
      BZMABE
       OICANA
       OMOOBI
        MEHCI

It occurred to me on playing Pwong that a sufficiently hampered processor might be able to simulate quantum tunneling. Consider: a physical computer can only simulate a small proportion of the known universe's 10^33 particles, and then at a fraction of the pace. Pwong sometimes has twenty or more particles onscreen moving at a nice clip, including ammunition. When the computer is under stress, the particles all slow down at random points, much like when a real-world particle is fired at a thin wall, and when the processor tries to catch up with the clock, the particles jump forward faster than is usually possible (c, the speed of light) and end up on the other side of my frickin' paddles. C'mon, why is collision detection so buggy sometimes? That ball was obviously heading toward that paddle, so it should've been bulldozed!

*ahem*

Here's a KenKen. ( Ready your stopwatches... )

I just called for Biggie Smalls, Candyman, Bloody Mary, and Betelgeuse, in that order, in my bathroom this morning. Nothing happened, but I can think of a couple possible reasons other than the obvious it never happens....

        PSI
TILE)TRIPLE
     TILE
      MEMLE
      MTEFS
        IAE

So since motris is trying to get KenKen under control (i.e. only reasonably popular, and with plenty of deserving puzzles), I thought I'd contribute. This one is themed with Fibonacci numbers arranged in a spiral pattern. Not as pretty as it could be, but provides plenty of variety. ( I swear, I don't know how it doubled in apparent size. )