31–40 of 66 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This one includes flags as an easy hint.
The flags don't really "do" anything. In the one configuration, every flag is held by a boy. In the other configuration one boy has no flag, and there is a severed hand holding a flag.
Part of the trick is that the boys are split into two parts and progress from more inside to more outside along the wheel. Since the unit "a boy" is based on real world experience where boys can be different sizes and especially since how much space a boy takes up in an image can vary depending on angle, we mentally accept that this mashup of different amounts of body parts adds up to "one boy" rather than thinking "…
Unfortunately this doesn't work with banknotes ... unless you can find lots of people who are willing to accept a banknote that appears to have been torn into two pieces and then stuck together again with sticky tape, with the line of the tear being a weird curve that just happens to cross both serial numbers in roughly the same place.
That sounds like something from Martin Gardener, I definitely heard of this trick!
Edit: "Sing Sing" in The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix.
> In desperation he did a foolish thing. He tried to make some twenty-dollar bills. His method was bizarre and surprising. With a paper cutter he sliced each of fourteen bills into two parts, cutting them neatly along the broken vertical lines on each of the schematic bills shown on the left side of Figure 4. [...]
> Unfortunately—or rather, fortunately—the United States government places duplicate serial numbers at opposite comers of every bill, and most of the numerologist's new bills therefore bore pairs of serial numbers that did not match. True, Dr. Matrix's method of making new bills was not exactly counterfeiting—he merely "rearranged" the parts of genuine bills. Nevertheless, the Treasury Department took a dim view of his work and it was not long until he found himself firmly confined within the matrix of cells at Sing Sing.
(note that although Gardner is best known as a nonfiction writer, the Dr. Matrix stories are fictional)
This was my grandpa's go to riddle for his grandkids (but with Francs). :-)
in a sense, there are only two boys, an inside boy and an outside boy, and where those two boys are together (at around 8 o'clock) you actually don't see 100% of either of them, yet you count it as two boys in the A position, look at around 8 oclock where the two boys next to each other. look at the "inside" boy, and then move clockwise and you just see just his foot on the inside, continue and you see a leg, going a…
Anybody want to figure out the year?
The puzzle was originally conceived in 1906. Love me some Sam Loyd, there is no greater chess puzzler in my mind.
http://www.marianotomatis.it/blog.php?post=blog/20110715&sec...
Whoever currently owns his name is still selling it, except now it refers to "warriors". https://www.samloyd.com/product/get-off-the-earth-card/
Is this just a visual version of the missing dollar riddle? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_dollar_riddle This was my grandpa's go to riddle for his grandkids (but with Francs). :-)
This one is closer to the missing square puzzle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_square_puzzle .
This is a calculus puzzle, you have approximately 13 boys "missing a tiny slice" of themselves versus 12 boys with "an extra little slice" of themselves... it's more clever than just "we take the slices and reassemble them", it's "the slices slowly sweep across the boys' body so that when we slide the circles we essentially accumulate a whole 'second boy' inside the internal circle." Sort of like how the missing square puzzle has a clever way to have two almost-parallel lines which are not parallel hiding a long skinny rhombus containing the extra area, but the rearrangement exposes it in a much more visually arresting form as a whole missing square.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The puzzle was originally conceived in 1906. Love me some Sam Loyd, there is no greater chess puzzler in my mind.
It's the less-racist remix of his 1896 "Get Off The Earth" puzzle, which contains twelve or thirteen "chinamen" in the exact same poses around a globe. http://www.marianotomatis.it/blog.php?post=blog/20110715&sec... Whoever currently owns his name is still selling it, except now it refers to "warriors". https://www.samloyd.com/product/get-off-the-earth-card/
1906. Typhoid probably got him.