If you are expecting another tale of me ending up triumphant like Coventry in February, I’m going to temper your expectations. This one went significantly worse. The Cotswold Open was held at The King’s School Gloucester, a beautiful location that was thankfully easy to get to via train so no hotel for me this time. There were only three sections to this tournament, so instead of the Open, Major,…
I travelled for my first tournament since I was a junior this weekend, to the Coventry Open. There were four sections and I played in the Under 1750 Intermediate Category, which I was just about eligible for, with a Standard rating of 1733. On the signup list I was seed 1 out of 24, but seed 2, a player called Willem, was rated only 5 points below me. I’ve never played three classical games in a…
This will be an ongoing page that I will update as I make more progress. Centenary Trail Known Structure A Very Straightforward Puzzle and Grid Copyright Page Penguin Puzzle Inside Front Cover Regex Crossword Unknown Inside Back Cover Obfuscated Code Puzzle Hunt Unknown Resistance is Futile How to do a Cipher Games Unknown Alphabet St. A Century Puzzle Solution Year Ciphertext Straight Forward and…
Here is the link. ABOUT THIS EPISODE The boys get experimental with tea and get as close as they ever will to covering sport. Odds and Evenings Twitter - https://twitter.com/OddsAndEvenings Website - http://www.oddsandevenings.com Topics discussed Tea Cooling Olympic Rankings Sherlock Holmes Puzzle Show Notes 2012 Olympics Per Capita plus Analysis Nobel Laureattes Per Capita 100 Labelled Boxes…
Here you go. ABOUT THIS EPISODE The boys get scared thinking about getting lost in space but feel better by the time they re-imagine ducks as triangles. Odds and Evenings Twitter - https://twitter.com/OddsAndEvenings Website - http://www.oddsandevenings.com Topics discussed The Princess Monster Game Duck Wakes A Poker Puzzle Show Notes The Princess Monster Game on Wiki The Princess Monster Game on…
Here it is. ABOUT THIS EPISODE The boys think about designing better Scrabble then don't. Also they geek out over this one book for like half the episode. Odds and Evenings Twitter - https://twitter.com/OddsAndEvenings Website - http://www.oddsandevenings.com Topics discussed The Number of Factors Sequence Scrabble Boards Gödel, Escher, Bach Show Notes Scrabble Trivia Words With Friends and…
Click here to go to the episode. #4 - Farthings, Fizz and Food Boards About This Episode The boys solve money, stare at bubbles and get a bit confused on a problem involving a Lazy Susan. Odds and Evenings Twitter - https://twitter.com/OddsAndEvenings Website - http://www.oddsandevenings.com Topics discussed Change and the Coin Problem Beer Bubbles The Blind Waiter Problem Show Notes Legal Tender…
I want this article to be an extensive to one of the problems we analysed in Odds and Evenings episode 1 . However you don't have to listen to episode to understand this. In the episode we had a think about the possible last digits of triangle numbers when you write them out normally (base 10). We came to the conclusion that the last digits from 0-9 occurred with the frequencies 4, 4, 0, 2, 0, 4,…
As with last year, mscroggs is hosting an advent calender of maths puzzles with a new puzzle each day. Putting together your answers to the 25 days you have all of the information you will need to solve a meta logic problem. He ran it last year and it is very high quality (and quite hard: I spent some of Christmas morning last year trying to sort out my couple of missing answers to no avail). In…
The first episode of my podcast is now out. You can listen to it on its own website straight away and over the next few days it will be appearing on all of the major podcast apps (it is already up in a few). Each one has a manual review process so there's nothing we can do but wait. This will be a fortnightly podcast dealing with mathematics, puzzles, numbers and games.
A student showed me this puzzle and I thought it was quite neat. I have £21.45 in coins. There are four denominations of coin, one of which is £1, and each denomination has the same number of coins. What coins do I have? I'm going to go straight into analysis since this was on Radio 4 recently, so look away now if you want to try it yourself. I want to talk about this problem more generally and so…
There has been a renovation of the square in front of the cathedral in my home town of Worcester with lots of new bars and restaurants. The tiles in the centre have a pattern on them which I have on good authority that they were originally designed to be full sheet music, but they were simplified into a more stylised design for their final form. Here’s a photo which shows the first two of the four…
The movie Blade Runner is based on a novel called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick. The movie plays up the action and downplays the robotic animals that the social climbers in the novel acquire so that they can pretend to their neighbours that they have real life pets, such as a sheep, long after most such things have gone extinct in the bleak dystopian world filled with…
I went to the Crystal Maze experience in Manchester on a Stag/Hen Do with my university friends this weekend. There were 8 of us and each challenge that you complete gains you one crystal. Each crystal gives your team 5 seconds of time in the crystal dome at the end where you try to collect as many golden tickets as you can. Some of the challenges get the team member attempting them to get locked…
The chess tournament that we run at school is underway and I host the results on my website. Here's the state as of the time I write this article: Each group has everyone play everyone else in the group twice, once as white and once as black. Each player is awarded 3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw and 0 points for a loss. The top 8 scorers across both groups will advance to the knockout…
This is the twelfth Ernest Dudeney puzzle that I've written up on this website and if you want to read others you can get a collection of them here . This particular one is from his tour de force: The Canterbury Puzzles, although I met it at the conference of my exam board, MEI, one year. As always, I'll let Dudeney introduce it in his original words: "One day, when the monks were seated at their…
This is one of those projects that took far longer than I thought it would. But a few episodes of Peep Show into editing with Paint.net I was rather locked in. I thought it would be interesting to divide the number of points for each section of the board. Notice that this isn't a metric that tells you where you should be aiming. Two points on that: firstly we would want to metric that rewarded…
Looking at lists of unsolved problems in maths always provides a strange combination of things that seem very difficult (as well they should) to misleadingly trivial. It is those in the latter category that are the most interesting. I want to introduce you to a packing problem which feels like it should be solvable with a bit of brute force from a computer. You have two circles of unit diameter.…
In a mock Oxbridge interview with a student, they claimed that the volume of a torus could be worked out by unwrapping it as a cylinder and simply treating it as a prism (the length of which you could work out by finding a circumference like below: This didn't seem right to me, because it felt like as you bent a cylinder, the inside would compress at a different rate to the outside expanding. It…
Here’s a pleasing question from the UK Maths Challenge today. There are a collection of lines in a plane such that each line has exactly 10 intersections. Which of the following are not a possible number of lines which could have this property? 11 12 15 16 20? Have a go and join me for discussion of the general problem below. … The answer is D. 11 is the easiest to see with by having them all have…