Tag Archives: math

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Here is the answer to the running puzzle I posted last month: In short, the simple version of the puzzle is that you are going to run around a track for 30 minutes, at the same time that you know your … Continue reading →

Steve Landsburg has posted a puzzle about dice. I haven’t thought about it much and I don’t know whether I can solve it but it looks pretty good: A standard pair of six-sided dice induce a probability distribution on the … Continue reading →

Suppose your friend offers you the opportunity to play this game for free: Your friend will flip a biased coin 1000 times, which has a 60% chance of coming up heads each time, and a 40% chance of coming up tails. Every … Continue reading →

Update Sept 3: Solution (to original version) is here Update 7/31: The solution to this puzzle requires not much math at all, if you think about it the right way. I’m tempted to only award beer if someone gets the … Continue reading →

Note: This is reposted due to my update with a hint and solution, and due to the (relatively) low quality of my post about politicians and animals. John Derbyshire has posted is a puzzle that I’ve never come across before, … Continue reading →

Update Saturday 1am: I am not totally satisfied with this puzzle as it feels a bit contrived. I think I can make it both more realistic and not that much more convoluted. I am going to try to do that … Continue reading →

Modify this puzzle in the following way: Suppose that the encoding is in trinary, with 0’s, 1’s and 2’s, and that 0 represents white and 1 represents black (as in the original) and that 2 represents red. Suppose further that … Continue reading →