thnik again!

“Challenge your mind and have fun in this amazing puzzle game. Help your characters on various quests in Arcade and Story modes. Reunite your friends, destroy baddies, and collect goodies! Remove blocks by clicking and dragging them with your mouse. New blocks will appear from the direction which you moved the mouse. The aim is to reunite your characters by sliding them together. You will have to do other things as the game progresses such as collecting cake and flushing bad guys away.”

Play it here.

- What are you reading?
- Did you know that 3685 = ( 3⁶ + 8 ) * 5?
- My wife told me the other day.
- Some kind of wife!
- She is imaginary!
- Oh, mine is complex.
- Aren’t these numbers called Friedman numbers?
- Yes, but why?
- All it says in the book is this:

A Friedman number is a positive integer which can be written in some non-trivial way using its own digits, together with the symbols + – x / ^ ( ) and concatenation. For example, 25 = 5² and 126 = 21 * 6.

- Is 1285 a Friedman number?
- Yes.
- How do you know?
- I am not allowed to tell.

You don’t have to work very hard to achieve very little. – Jan Nordgreen

- The radius of the big circle is 10.
- You mean the circle which has the four yellow circle and five green circles within it?
- Is that green? When did you have your eyes checked the last time?
- What is the radius of circle 1?
- Let me find out.
- What is the radius of circle 2?
- Don’t talk. I am busy.

The diagram is taken from Math Magic Packing Archive.

I’ve heard that the government wants to put a tax on the mathematically ignorant. Funny, I thought that’s what the lottery was!  - Gallagher

- Sometimes I wonder.
- Me too!
- Just wonder. Are there intelligent lives on other planets?
- Are there intelligent lives on this planet?
- Why do we live?
- Why do people wonder why we live?
- Are you mocking me?
- I wonder what gave you that idea.
- Cut the crap!
- OK. Here is what I am really wondering about.
- Let’s hear it.
- Do squares with one million digits of which half are even exist?
- Now, that is interesting!
- Because it has a precise answer?
- Someone told me once that questions without answers are more frequent.
- I wonder what the ratio is.

Problems source:  The Emissary Newsletter’s Puzzle section by Elwyn Berlekamp and Joe P Buhler.

- How was the movie?
- It was OK. But I had seen it before.
- ‘Stand and Deliver’ wasn’t it?
- Yes, about Jaime Escalante’s unbelievable success with his maths students.
- I must see it.
- Yes, you must. But something that happened before the movie began was equally interesting.
- How come?
- I went with my girlfriend Tara and we were supposed to meet her friend Hugo at the cinema.
- Hugo, the plumber.
- He is an apprentice plumber, yes.
- I have always wanted to be a plumber.
- We didn’t find him, so we were searching the rows and files for him. I searched the rows with my eyes from left to right starting at the first row and then the second from left to right, and so on.
- I could never be that systematic.
- Tara did the same thing, but with the files.
- Did any of you find him.
- Yes.
- I am wondering which method is best. Searching by rows or by files?
- We were wondering about the very same thing after the movie!
- Were there more files than rows?
- Yes.
- What did you and Tara find out?
- Not a lot, but Hugo solved the puzzle in no time.
- I have always wanted to work with water.

Problems source:  The Emissary Newsletter’s Puzzle section by Elwyn Berlekamp and Joe P Buhler.

I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam. – Charles Babbage

Magnus Carlsen, the no 1 ranked chess player, challenges you here. Solve three puzzles in record time and be no 1 on his list.

By the way, the world’s no 1 is now playing in the Tata Steel tournament. Read about it in his blog, or follow it on the official web site or watch the games commented at chessbomb.

Oh, I almost forgot, how did you do in the challenge? Me?! Number 354 on the list with no improvement in sight.