If you're looking for Nucleus, it's in the entry chronologically previous to this, which makes it the one below this nine times out of ten. I asked Ed to change the link on his site, but I guess he hasn't checked his mail yet. For now, I'll talk about TV and puzzles in about that order.

I haven't been keeping up with Heroes and Chuck, partly because I can catch up on those easily. Tonight, I was going to watch one of them on the computer and the other on G4, but my family decided to watch home decorating shows, so I just watched both on the computer. I noticed the pinch of the WGA strike in the way Sylar found Suresh's place. Spoiler: ( it's a little disappointing. )


Now, NUMB3RS I have kept up on. I started playing Chain Factor almost as soon as I saw that, yes, there was indeed an ARG associated with the episode "Primacy." I uncovered a couple of Error Codes (capitalized because of course they're planted), though I was only chasing my tail on the Key Codes. It's winding down now, what with eleven of twelve Shutdown Keys having been discovered. About the episode "Graphic"... ( I wonder )


Well, I'd better wrap up before midnight. Here's the name of a president. Decode it.

13 83 86 67 13 25

EDIT: Corrected a probability and added a hint.

After seeing the hexagonal Black Box on MathPuzzle.com, I decided to push my hexagonal Magnets-like puzzle, called Nucleus. The groups of three circles are either protons or neutrons, the gray circles are gluons, and the uncolored circles are quarks. Quarks are either red, green, or blue, and though in neutrons they cannot be distinguished, same-colored quarks never touch among protons. Of course, each proton consists of one red, one green, and one blue quark. Given the numbers of distinguishable quarks in some lines, determine the placements of all the protons.



(Oh for crying out loud, why doesn't the spell-check recognize the plural of "gluon"?)

In case you were wondering, NO I did not get my Halloween costume ready in time. And now, it's time for SPOILERS!


Chuck! Revelation!( Revelation! )

I must say, though, part of that Green segment during the commercial break with Morgan and Casey rubbed me the wrong way. Morgan said he had an eco-friendly vehicle, and Casey responded by pointing out that said vehicle was a bike. It was supposed to be a put-down. What? Oh, come on! Bicycles are a standard alternative to normal cars; lots of people chose to ride bikes instead of cars specifically because they didn't use gas, loooong before things like hybrid cars started popping up. I wouldn't be surprised if NBC had received, let's call it a kickback, from the car companies for putting that crack in there. Phoo....


Heroes! Revelation!( Revelation! )


Journeyman! Revelation!( Revelation! )

I recently looked for a minimal greatest-cover of the alphabet using chemical symbols. More specifically, since J and Q are not part of any element's symbol (although Jl was proposed for element 105, dubnium, when it was called "joliotium"), I wanted to find a set of symbols that used each of the other 24 letters (hence "greatest-cover") with as few duplicates as possible (hence "minimal").

As it turns out, I found a cover that used exactly 24 letters rather easily by going through the alphabet in order, so I put a couple more constraints on the challenge. I've found several solutions with 13 symbols, for example. Solutions that minimize the sum or product of the corresponding atomic numbers are also preferable, but I've put this under "open" and not "math" because I think you don't need to optimize either of those unless you have both spare time and programming experience.

I'd rather not check whether I've set a personal record for longest time between posts, thank you very much. I'll give my thoughts on "Heroes," "NUMB3RS," and also "Chuck" later. For now, a puzzle.

The letters that represent Roman numerals are IVXLCDM. In this puzzle, we won't worry about what they mean, just their relative positions in the alphabet. First, notice that C and D are right next to each other, as are L and M. We say each of these pairs of letters defines a difference of 1. If the alphabet is thought to wrap around as in a Caesar cipher, then the various unordered pairs of letters define all integer (of course) distances from 1 to 13.

Fill in the dashes below, one letter per dash, so that the string contains two of each letter and all thirteen distances are defined by neighboring letters. For example, IVXLCDM defines distances of 13, 2, 12, 9, 1, and 9 again, and the repeated 9 is not allowed.

D L _ _ C V _ _ I M _ _ D M

Today's spell-check folly: IVXLCDM => OVERCLOCKED.

I turned 21 yesterday, and it was a good birthday. I had a nice dinner with family and friends, and I got just about everything I asked for. I guess that's a good reason for an update.

Now, the third Jay is Games game design competition had some interesting "replay" games, and I got addicted to Gimme Friction Baby, getting a high score of 22. But I want to talk about the other game I got addicted to, Karma.


Why, I wonder, is a score being kept? The score per round is higher the less time is spent in a life, so one would think the idea is to get a higher score, and cleansing a sin gets more points, but the faster you cleanse the seven sins, the fewer total rounds you have to score points.

So, ignoring points, here's a question based on the mechanics of the game. The mechanics are:
1. In each life, the computer randomly places the player on the edge of a square field and a conch shell on the interior.
2. In each life, the player draws a path from the starting point on the edge to the pyre in the center of the field.
3. After a sixth path has been drawn, the earliest path that was on the field vanishes, leaving five (again).
4. If the new path crosses any path, the game is lost.
5. If the new path crosses a conch, the player washes away one sin.
6. When the player washes away seven sins, the game is won.

Now, assume that a) the conch is a point, b) paths have zero width, c) the player will never cross a path but otherwise always retrieve the conch, and d) the area of a sector defined by two paths and the perimeter is in exact proportion with the section of perimeter defined by the starting points of those paths. In short, assume perfect design and perfect play.

What is the expected number of lifetimes in this player's game?

Darn. I should have posted on Friday the 13th, because I have this puzzle that would have been germane then. Oh well.

It is somewhat well-known that all years have a Friday the 13th in them. Less well-known is that regardless of the year, one group of seven consecutive months is guaranteed to have a Friday the 13th. What are those seven months? Bonus question: what is the longest period between consecutive Fridays 13?

Nothing much else to report. Someone on the rec.puzzles Google Group independently found the intended answer to one of my puzzles, and others found longer words. However, I like the ones that don't use the same inflection of words of the same part of speech twice, and those seem to top out at 6.

I just participated in the Google U.S. Puzzle Championship and boy are my arms tired. Ha! But seriously, folks, I need to apologize to whomever made puzzle 7, Circuit Maze. Here, let me start at the beginning.

A few months ago (March 23, apparently), I was browsing the Google group at http://groups.google.com/group/rec.puzzles/topics and saw this post by one Mark Steere. His puzzle seemed interesting, but it was too big for anyone to contemplate. That post spawned a 60-post thread of arguments with Mr. Steere about why he refused to make a smaller maze, finally concluding with Walter D. Pullen using his program Daedalus to find the solution path.

To me and many posters (to be sure, I'm not a member of that group), this refusal was absurd, or at least expressed absurdly. (The attraction of trolls was inevitable, and of course not helpful.) These two paragraphs from this post best describe the two sides of the argument:

MARK STEERE: I'm just getting tired of all the baby complaints. I heard them all already before posting. "I want a smaller one." "I want a colored one." "I can't fill in the dead ends with a pencil." This is like saying that you want to run in the marathon, but only if you can hop on a moped at some point and cut across town. It's cheating.

SIMON TATHAM: Well, hold on there; not all of those are alike. 'I want a smaller one' is like saying that you want to run in the marathon, but only if you can practise on shorter courses first- which is an eminently sensible thing to do if you want to run a marathon and have no previous running experience!

In retrospect, I could have checked this maze again before starting the test, but it slipped my mind. What I want to apologize for is this comment I submitted with my answers:
Whoever designed "Circuit Maze" is an insufferable blowhard. He should be told that while Marathons don't come in graduated sizes, races do, and so should his mazes.

So there's more than one problem with this. Not only did I not specifically target Mark Steere (due to not remembering his name (also, I'd be lying if I said I hadn't wanted to target him)), but puzzle 7 actually is much smaller than the original maze. So even ignoring the (comparatively levelheaded) rough tone, my comment was likely undeserved.

So to whomever I insulted, I'm sorry. Once I find out whether it was Mark Steere or someone else who created this particular maze, I'll apologize again.

BELATED EDIT: Turns out Mark did make that other maze. I'll just be standing by my comment.

I saw "Kill Bill Vol. 1" yesterday, an activity which bled into today. Figuratively speaking, of course. I find it odd, though, that I can tolerate movies with so much violence, as I don't tend to seek those out.

Speaking of Bill, I finished Bill Clinton's NYT crossword a while ago after maybe a week and a half. (No, I'm not posting the solution.) As sort of a celebration, I created this ambigram (which has nothing to do with Bill Clinton).

I just realized that "Do you support the troops?" is a loaded question. The trick is that if you support the people, the question is phrased so that it sounds like you have to support their trooplike activities. Of course, many if not most soldiers would rather not fight. If you hear this in an argument, there's no way to guarantee a "win"; just point out the loadedness and say "yes, but not as troops."

Tom Tomorrow (among others, I'm sure) has compared the current Bush presidency to the Nixon presidency. The current Gulf War obviously corresponds to Vietnam, and the current wiretap scandal suggests Watergate. So I was trying to think up a third analogic similarity, but I came up with a disparity instead; if Baudy Dubya resigns or gets impeached, Tricky Dick Cheney would be next in line, and would likely be seen as more competent than the man he's replacing. I'm sure this is why the Democrats have been sitting on their hands.
(Note: First, I'm sort of joking. Second, I've misspelled "bawdy" above, but it's otherwise a nice anagram. Third, "bawdy" may not be an accurate description, but see the second point.)

Now, I know I suggested I'd talk about the Colorado Math Olympiad, but I was going to give two math exercises, and I figured that would be rather dull. So instead, here's an alphametic/cryptarithm which answers a question skipped over in "Sideways Arithmetic from Wayside School."

  APPLES
+ORANGES
 NOGRAPE