Movies

Can you solve the “scrambled box tops” puzzle?

Here’s a puzzle from Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games column, which ran for many years in Scientific American. I found it in his low-priced Dover edition anthology, My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles. Imagine that you have three boxes, one containing two black marbles, one containing two white marbles, and the third, one black marble and…

Admin

Published on May 25, 2020

Here’s a puzzle from Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games column, which ran for many years in Scientific American. I found it in his low-priced Dover edition anthology, My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles.

Imagine that you have three boxes, one containing two black marbles, one containing two white marbles, and the third, one black marble and one white marble. The boxes were labeled for their contents – BB, BW, WW – but someone switched the labels so that every box is now incorrectly labeled. You are allowed to take one marble at a time out of any box, without looking inside, and by this process of sampling you are to determine the contents of all three boxes. What is the smallest number of drawings needed to do this?

Watching this guy solve a sudoku is deeply satisfying

Simon Anthony is cohost of a sudoku YouTube channel called Cracking the Cryptic. In this video he solves a difficult sudoku puzzle with extra constraints. It’s really fun to watch him solve it and get more excited as his sense of wonder grows (“This is like the universe is singing to us,” he says as […]

READ THE REST

Can you rearrange these cards, sudoku style?

Here’s a fun puzzle with an easy setup that makes for a good stay-at-home time-filler. Like sudoku, see if you can rearrange these cards so that no face or suit repeats itself in any column, row, or diagonal. Watch the video if you need some help.

READ THE REST

Watch a master solve a nightmare ring puzzle

An old man in Japan owns a vintage topological puzzle, a little monster so difficult to solve that it ended up on Knight Scoop being taken to a physics professor, a professional magician and a chimpanzee in an effort to figure it out. Eventually a ring puzzle master shows how it’s done (10:40 if you’re […]

READ THE REST

This digital content training will have customers chasing you, not the other way around

Real Life. Real News. Real Voices

Help us tell more of the stories that matter

Become a founding member

Promoting products is almost nothing like it was back in the Mad Men days. In fact, the digital landscape has changed the ad game so much that it barely even resembles early Grey’s Anatomy days anymore. Marketing a product digitally isn’t about the right ad slogan or color scheme. It’s about crafting the narrative around […]

READ THE REST

The Coconut Light goes anywhere, fits anywhere, and it’s hypnotically cool

Every once in a while, we see a new product come along that’s so versatile and elegantly simple that it’s strange no one’s ever gone there before. Portable lights themselves aren’t new, but there’s something about the MOGICS Coconut Light that’s so seamlessly well-designed and adaptable that it feels startlingly original. The Coconut is basically […]

READ THE REST

30 items on sale for Memorial Day that’ll improve your home and beyond

With the U.S. cautiously reopening, it’s probably time to take stock of where you’re at. After spending all these weeks in the house, you’ve likely already assembled a little list of items you either realized you were missing or need to replace. And those kinds of revelations probably apply to nearly every room. We got […]