OddThinking

I started to read the question: “Anthony and Janet are chemistry students and are having an argument about-”

“Stop there!” interrupted my father!

“I will read your mind!” boasted the mentalist. “You can pick a colour, or a flower, or an element of the periodic table, write it down, show it to the audience and seal it in an envelope. Then I will read your mind and predict what it says! In fact, you could write any English word, and I will predict it.”

I learnt a new Cheapass card game recently. It was an interesting and thought-provoking game, but I am not going to talk about the game-play today. I am going to talk about the initial set-up, and an unsolved puzzle it brings up.

An implementation of a Kakuro Solver.

I give a theoretical analysis of the time taken for a pedestrian to negotiate diagonally across an intersection, depending on the cycles of the traffic lights… although my name’s not Bamber.

What is it? It’s astounding and will amaze your friends and family!

Here’s an interesting real world puzzle: After fixing an intermittent bug, how many test runs do you need to do in order to be convinced that it has gone?

Can anyone recognise a lizard from its description?

Here’s a little challenge for the software developers.

A magic trick for C programmers to try,