My wife and I walk up an ascending escalator. I climb 20 steps and reach the top in 60 seconds. My wife climbs 16 steps and reaches the top in 72 seconds. If the escalator broke tomorrow, how many steps would we have to climb?
Puzzles
Black and White
Pointing Fingers
Only one of these statements is true. Which is it?
A. All of the below
B. None of the below
C. One of the above
D. All of the above
E. None of the above
F. None of the above
Milestones
A conundrum by French puzzle maven Pierre Berloquin:
Caroline leaves town driving at a constant speed. After some time she passes a milestone displaying a two-digit number. An hour later she passes a milestone displaying the same two digits but in reverse order. In another hour she passes a third milestone with the same two digits (in some order) separated by a zero.
What is the speed of Caroline’s car?
Two Olive Problems
1. A friend gives you a bottle that contains seven olives. Two of them are green and five are black. He bets that if you remove three olives at random from the bottle, they’ll include a green one. Should you take the bet?
2. Agnes has a tin of olives. It originally contained both black and green ones, but someone has been eating them, so she’s not sure of the colors of the 14 olives that remain. She removes 7 at random and finds that they’re all green. If the odds of this happening were exactly 50-50, what are the colors of the remaining 7?
Railway Mazes
In 2000, the residents of Luppitt, East Devon, installed a granite bench decorated with a variety of puzzles and curiosities that “it is hoped will be practical and entertaining for most of the next millennium.”
Among the puzzles is this “railway maze,” contributed by Roger Penrose. Make your way from Start in the upper left to Finish in the lower right. The catch is that your train has no reverse gear — you must move continually forward, following the natural curve of the track and making no sharp turns.
Foursquare
Print out two copies of this pattern, cut them out, and fold each along the dotted lines, making two identical solids. Then fit these two pieces together to make a regular tetrahedron.
This sounds dead simple, but it stumped me for some time. See if you can do it. (There’s no trick — the task is just what it seems.)
Black and White
In S.S. Van Dine’s The Bishop Murder Case (1929), someone is killing chessplayers and leaving a black bishop at each crime scene. The prime suspect is John Pardee, promoter of a chess opening called the Pardee Gambit, which he hopes to establish in master play. But Pardee kills himself, despondent after losing to Akiba Rubinstein at the Manhattan Chess Club. It turns out that the real killer was only using the chess angle to throw suspicion onto others.
Van Dine based Pardee on a real person, Isaac Leopold Rice, who sponsored numerous tournaments in which his Rice Gambit was the required opening. But practice showed that the best White could hope for was a draw, and the line was abandoned after World War I. In 1979 Larry Evans wrote, “One of the most heavily analyzed openings in history is now never played, interred in a footnote of the latest opening manual.”
In the book, investigators determine that Pardee had faced the position above against Rubinstein shortly before his suicide. White has just realized that Black has a forced win in four moves. How does Black play?
A Geometric Paradox
