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I recently went on a bike ride where I noticed curiously that the start point, the finish point and the rest point were all exactly the same distance from my house.
The first leg of the ride involved riding 23 miles due east and then 7 miles due north, whereupon I arrived at the rest point.
The second leg of the ride involved riding 15 miles due east and then 9 miles due north to the finish.
How far is my house from the start/rest/finish points?
Three solid balls fit snugly into a conical container, so that each is just touching the inside of the cone all the way round, and just touching the ball above/below it.
The smallest ball, at the bottom of the stack, weighs 12kg. The largest ball weighs 147kg.
How much does the middle ball weigh?
Arrange these 15 ‘triples’ into 5 related words of 9 letters each:
ARM, CHA, COR, DER, EEK, FEN, IAN, ILE, INT, ISE, MOM, RAN, SPE, STA, UGR.
If you place a sphere inside a cube-shaped box that is only just big enough to contain the cube, the sphere will 52% fill the cube. The closest fraction to this, with a single digit numerator and denominator, is 1/2.
If you were to place 4 identical spheres inside a cube shaped box only just big enough to contain them, what proportion of the box filled by the spheres (to the closest single digit fraction)?
Three circular tables are placed against a wall, such that each table exactly touches the wall and the other two tables. The distance between the points where the two larger tables touch the wall is precisely 300cm. Given that the radius of each table is a whole number, how big are the tables?
Place the twelve 6-digit numbers into the grid (one digit in each cell), half of them left-to-right and half of them top-to-bottom.
What is the 6-digit number to be found along the main diagonal (from top-left to bottom-right)?
Draw a path that visits every dot once only. The path will be made only of horizontal and vertical lines. The path cannot cross itself or branch off, and must return to the start to form a complete circuit. Every third turning point in the circuit path has been marked by a triangle symbol.
It is well-known that a circle can be uniquely defined by three points on its circumference, providing they are not collinear.
I have ascertained that the analogous number of points needed to uniquely define an ellipse is five, with the condition that each of those five points lies strictly outside the quadrilateral formed by the other four.
What I don’t know is how, given the planar coordinates of the five points, you could discover other information about the ellipse, such as axis lengths, orientation and position. I’m not at all sure there is a method that will work in the general case.
In some specific cases, it is possible to work out the position, orientation and axes of the ellipse, given the co-ordinates of five points.
For instance, given the points (1,0), (2,0), (0,1), (0,2) and (1,2) lying on an ellipse, find the length of the minor axis.
Three people have to carry five boxes a distance of 120m from point A to point B. They each travel at a speed of 1m/s when carrying a box, or 2m/s when returning empty-handed for another box. Each person can carry only one box at a time.
What is the minimum time it will take them to carry all five boxes to point B?
People often ask where I get the ideas for my puzzles. This one has a typically mundane origin: I was bringing grocery shopping in from the car with my two children. There was more than we could manage in one trip so return trips were necessary. I started to wonder whether dropping groceries partway to the kitchen might be more efficient. We didn’t implement such a solution, but it did get me thinking about how I could reformulate the question as a puzzle, so here we are.
Just one instance of one word to find: ENIGMA
This is a real life problem I encountered in my job. To try to make explain it I’ll talk in terms of x,y,z coordinates.
There is one pipe heading from the negative–x direction towards the (0,0,0) origin point. 100mm before it reaches the origin, the pipe bends such that the radius of the centre line of the pipe is 100mm. After 90 degrees it straightens out so that it is heading on the +y axis.
A second pipe is heading from the +x direction towards the origin. Again it bends with a centre line radius of 100mm for 90 degrees before heading on the +z axis.
What is the minimum distance between the pipes' centre lines? I’ll be happy with 1 decimal place.
Some students (fewer than 100 in total) were split into two classes.
The simple mean average between the sizes of the two classes was noted.
Each of the students was asked how large their class was, and the mean average of their responses was calculated, and was found to be precisely 7 more than the simple mean average.
How many students were in each of the two classes?
A wealthy old woman died, and in her will she divided her fortune amongst her eight daughters. The total amount to be divided was less than 10000 ducats, and each daughter received a whole number of ducats according to the following:
The eldest daughter received 1/15 of the total.
The second daughter received 1/13 of what remained after the first daughter’s share was removed.
The third daughter received 1/11 of what remained after the previous daughters’ shares were taken.
The fourth daughter received 1/9 of what then remained.
The fifth daughter received 1/7 of what then remained.
The sixth daughter received 1/5 of what then remained.
The seventh daughter received 1/3 of what then remained.
Finally the youngest, favourite daughter received all of the remaining fortune.
How much did the youngest daughter receive?
Draw fences between some of the posts so that each post is at the junction of exactly THREE fences.
These fences will divide the field into several PADDOCKS; any paddock whose area is greater than a single triangle will contain a NUMBER, which will indicate the area of the paddock, or in other words the number of TRIANGLES that make up the paddock.
The boundary fence is already in place, so any post on the boundary only needs one more fence emerging from it in order to make up its full complement.
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I have a triangle which contains two circles of radius 1, which do not overlap each other or the edges of the triangle.
The triangle has the least possible PERIMETER to contain those circles.
What is the perimeter?
Chances are you've never met a Shadowbox puzzle before, as it is my own invention, so I'll explain how they work.
Despite looking like crosswords, they are logic puzzles rather than word puzzles, since you don't need to be familiar with any of the words, or know their meanings.
The idea behind the puzzles is actually very simple: you need to fit all of the listed words into the grid, in a crossword style (ie. all words reading left-right or downwards, forming a lattice, with black squares in between). However, you must construct the grid of black squares and letter squares as you go along, using just three very simple rules:
1: A grey squares means that the square will either become a black square, or else it will contain a vowel (A, E, I, O, U).
2: A white square will definitely contain a consonant.
3: The final pattern of black squares and letter squares will be symmetrical in horizontal, vertical and diagonal directions.
Please visit and like https://www.facebook.com/elliottlinepuzzles/ Send me a message on that page if you think you have the answer, and I'll let you know if you're correct.
If you enjoyed this puzzle, I have good news for you: I published an entire book of 100 of them, which you can find here: http://www.lulu.com/shop/elliott-line/shadowbox-logical-crossword-puzzles/paperback/product-20347753.html or here https://www.amazon.co.uk/Shadowbox-Logical-Crossword-Puzzles-Elliott/dp/1447861965/
Another bonus 'Puzzle of the Week'.
Draw fences between some of the posts so that each post is at the junction of exactly THREE fences.
These fences will divide the field into several PADDOCKS; any paddock whose area is greater than a single triangle will contain a NUMBER, which will indicate the area of the paddock, or in other words the number of TRIANGLES that make up the paddock.
The boundary fence is already in place, so any post on the boundary only needs one more fence emerging from it in order to make up its full complement.
Please visit and like https://www.facebook.com/elliottlinepuzzles/ Send me a message on that page if you think you have the answer, and I'll let you know if you're correct.
I have taken a short passage of text and encoded it according to the table below. Your task is to decode it. Be careful, as some sequences of numbers could lead to several words, for instance 31110 could mean CAT (3,1,110), but could equally mean MAD (31,1,10).
Please visit and like https://www.facebook.com/elliottlinepuzzles/ Send me a message on that page if you think you have the answer, and I'll let you know if you're correct.
Another bonus 'Puzzle of the Week'.
Draw fences between some of the posts so that each post is at the junction of exactly THREE fences.
These fences will divide the field into several PADDOCKS; any paddock whose area is greater than a single triangle will contain a NUMBER, which will indicate the area of the paddock, or in other words the number of TRIANGLES that make up the paddock.
The boundary fence is already in place, so any post on the boundary only needs one more fence emerging from it in order to make up its full complement.
Why not visit https://www.facebook.com/elliottlinepuzzles/
A question for you: I'm busy putting together a new book of puzzles (and then trying to get it published or self-published).
Should it be a wide assortment of puzzles like my Puzzle of the Week?
Should it be a mixture of Paddocks and other original map/maze/grid/path style logic puzzles?
Or should it be primarily or even exclusively Paddocks puzzles?
All comments welcome!