Posts from — December 2005

Tonight’s riddle is harder than most. I’m very confident that I’ve figured out the answer, but I can’t come up with a simple and convincing way to explain it. Definitely a fun riddle, though, since at first it seems that there is no possible answer.

A group of people live on an island. They are all perfect logicians — if a conclusion can be logically deduced, they will do it instantly. No one knows the color of their eyes. Every night at midnight, a ferry stops at the island. If anyone has figured out the color of their own eyes, they [must] leave the island that midnight.

Who leaves the island, and on what night?

Some notes:
There are no mirrors or reflecting surfaces, nothing dumb, It is not a trick question, and the answer is logical. It doesn’t depend on tricky wording, and it doesn’t involve people doing something silly like creating a sign language or doing genetics. The Guru is not making eye contact with anyone in particular; she’s simply saying “I count at least one blue-eyed person on this island who isn’t me.”

And lastly, the answer is not “no one leaves.”

Suggested strategy: Imagine what would happen if there were far fewer people. Be careful when generalizing this, though
Another suggested strategy: When you consider the small case, what would happen if the guru were not there?

<font color=”white”>reminder</font>

Getting the answer is tricky but not hugely difficult… coming up with a succinct, strong explanation is. Enjoy this one!

Tonight’s riddle has been used in interviews for Lutron, I’ve heard. I don’t think it’s a particularly good interview question, since there’s very little process to it, I just think they used it because it had to do with lighting.

You are in a room with three light switches, each of which controls one of three light bulbs in the next room. Your task is to determine which switch controls which bulb. All lights are initially off, and you can’t see into one room from the other. You are allowed only one chance to enter the room with the light bulbs. How can you determine which light switch goes with which light bulb?

Hint: Take your time

Remember <font color=”white”> and </font>.

My brother solved the square puzzle that I posted before (nobody else has reported finding the solution). The solution is posted below the cut.

Brian came up with a good strategy to get started: find the total area of the pieces in order to figure out the length of the sides. This quickly limits the number of possibilities worth trying.

New riddle coming soon.

Today’s featured article of the day on wikipedia was Arrested Development. The article has a lot of interesting information for fans of the show.

At the bottom of the page, there are links to several petitions to keep the show running. One that I signed had 26,000 people signed up already, which seems relatively significant for that sort of thing. Not sure if it has any effect, but it can’t hurt to try. The wikipedia article seems to suggest that the show’s fate isn’t quite sealed yet, though I’m not sure how authoritative that is.

Tobias: “It’s a wonderful restaurant!”
Narrator: “It sure is!”

One of my favorite lines in the show, and I’m not quite sure why… David Cross’ delivery is just awesome.

This riddle I wasn’t able to get on my own, but maybe I just didn’t spend enough time with it. Someone with better spacial abilities should be able to get it.

Take the pieces in this image:

and arrange them (all 5) to form a square. No overlapping. To print out the image click here. It’s not easy to describe a solution, so I’ll just post a picture of it after a few days, so don’t read the comments if you’re still working on it.

I have been tagged by ….

Ground Rules:
The first player of this “game” starts with the topic “5 weird habits of yours” and people who get tagged need to write an LJ entry about their 5 quirky habits as well as state this rule clearly.

1. If I’m doing work that involves thinking and sitting at a desk, I have to empty all of my pockets.
2. I won’t play beirut in a long-sleeved shirt. In fact, There are only 4 shirts in which I play.
3. I refuse to knowingly eat “lite” cream cheese, even if it tastes exactly like regular (which it doesn’t). Same goes for skim milk, etc.
4. When walking around campus, most of my time is spent optimizing my route from one place to another, even if I’m walking the same place I go every day.
5. If I’m walking on evenly spaced tiles, I either like to have a constant number of steps per tile or figure out some sort of pattern (without changing my stride).

Hmm, I shall tag:





and whoever else wants to do it

After a lot of time in the lab this week, I finally had interesting results to report and help write up for a paper Prof. Baird was submitting to the 7th IAPR Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (in New Zealand in Feb… no, I’m not going). My contributions were significant enough that I’m listed as an author, which is very exciting. It’s my second published paper and the results in this one are much more promising. You can read it if you want: Towards Versatile Document Image Content Extraction. Not sure why you’d want to, but whatever. My contributions are mainly on pages 7, 8, and 9.

All of this made me realize, for some reason, that I should have a more respectable website somewhere (yes, even more respectable then “magicspatula.com”). Long story short, I ended up spending about 4 hours working on my lehigh website tonight, making it more professional without making it seem like it was written by someone else. It now contains information about my academic experience, research interests, publications, and descriptions of some of the programming projects I’ve done outside of work/class. Feel free to take a look at the site and offer feedback if something’s wrong, could be clearer, is missing, etc.

I added this userpic, too, since my expression in the picture is one that I didn’t know that I made.

This one isn’t too hard if you think about every possible situation and eliminate impossible ones as you go through the question.

There are 3 black hats and 2 white hats in a box. Three men (we will call them A, B, & C) each reach into the box and place one of the hats on his own head. They cannot see what color hat they have chosen. The men are situated in a way that A can see the hats on B & C’s heads, B can only see the hat on C’s head and C cannot see any hats. When A is asked if he knows the color of the hat he is wearing, he says no. When B is asked if he knows the color of the hat he is wearing he says no. When C is asked if he knows the color of the hat he is wearing he says yes and he is correct. What color hat and how can this be?

Don’t forget your <font color=”white”> and </font>

Do you want easier or harder riddles? Or perhaps ones that are more linguistic or situational than logical?