Editorial

Thoroughly Confounding Enigmas

TERRY STICKELS MAY well be this country’s premier puzzle person, maybe even the best in the world. He has an impressive page on Wikipedia. He has his own website. He’s made a living writing logic puzzles, and writing about logic puzzles, for decades.

Stickels is widely known for his three internationally syndicated columns. Frame Games, seen in “USA Weekend” magazine, is read by over 48,000,000 people in 600 newspapers weekly. He concurrently writes Stickelers for King Features, appearing in over 200 newspapers daily. This column is carried by such papers as the “Washington Post,” “The Chicago Sun Times,” “The Denver Post,” and the “Toronto Star.” He also is the featured puzzle columnist for the “Guardian” newspaper, London’s largest newspaper.

I met Terry over a decade ago and we’ve worked on several crossword puzzle books together, and one book of cryptograms, “Quotable Cryptograms,” published by Random House and available at better bookstores everywhere. This all happened between my career as a magazine editor in New York City and retiring to become editor and publisher of “Perihelion” version 2.0. But that is another story which has been told on this page before.

Recently I asked Terry if he would be interested in contributing a few brain teasers of a science fiction bent that would challenge even the rocket scientists among us. And he did. So without further ado, I’m happy to present a handful of Thoroughly Confounding Enigmas, by Terry Stickels. Solutions can be found elsewhere in this issue.

Square Meals

Cube Eaters from the Fourth Dimension are attacking a stack of sixty-four sugar cubes. A team of Cube Eaters consists of several “face attackers.” They enter the cubes from one of the side faces and eat all of the cubes in that row. If they happen to meet one of their teammates eating a row from another face, whoever gets to the cube first gets to eat that cube, and the other one continues on its path. Each Cube Eater team has one “Diagonal Attacker” who starts at the top left corner and eats diagonally through the stack, one cube at a time, to the bottom of the right corner (from A to B in the figure at right). Once a row is started, it is always completed. How many cubes has this team of Cube Eaters eaten from the stack of sugar cubes shown in the picture at right?

On my first visit to the home of the Cube Eaters, I was fascinated by the difference of our three-dimensional world compared to their four dimensions ... and equally fascinated by our similarities.

A perfect example is their number system. Because none of the Cube Eaters are taller than three millimeters, they didn’t think using our Base-10 number system would be the best choice for them. They have a number system based on 1/10 (the Cube Eaters love fractions and they contend that their higher level mathematics courses actually become easier to learn using Base-1/10).

All Your Base

During a tour of their advanced mathematics campus in the Province of Tesseract, the Mathematics Professor asked me if I could convert numbers from Base-10 to Base-1/10 ... and vice versa. I said I would give it a try ... and when I discovered the answer, I was amazed at what was before my eyes. Here is the question: What is the number 1,357.975 (Base-10) when it is converted to Base-1/10?

Because of our dimensional differences, the Cube Eaters are not able to speak or write English; however, if they put our twenty-six letters into the form of cryptograms the translations convey their meanings in perfect English. To make communication between our worlds easier, they provide each 3D visitor with a translation device that works for both the written and spoken word.

Code Breaking

They welcomed me to their planet with open arms and honored me at a luncheon. Below is some humor in cryptogram form they thought I might enjoy. It is from Mark Twain. See how long it takes you to unscramble the code.

CQGH A CXZ LENHSGB, A DENYM BGIGITGB XHLVQAHS,
CQGVQGB AV QXM QXUUGHGM EB HEV; TNV IL
KXDNYVAGZ XBG MGDXLAHS HEC XHM ZEEH A ZQXYY
TG ZE A DXHHEV BGIGITGB XHL TNV VQG VQAHSZ VQXV
HGOGB QXUUGHGM. AV AZ ZXM VE SE VE UAGDGZ YARG
VQAZ TNV CG XYY QXOG VE ME AV.

Pole to Pole

On the neighboring planet Xenon there is only one airport and it is located on its North Pole. There are only three airplanes on the planet. Each plane’s fuel tank holds just enough fuel to allow each plane to make it one way to the South Pole. There is an unlimited supply of fuel at the airport and the airplanes can transfer their fuel to one another. Your mission is to fly around the globe/planet with at least one airplane covering the circular journey and flying over the South Pole on its return to the North Pole. The planes may stop at anytime along the way. (Note: the journey must be accomplished by flying in a “great circle.” All great circles of a given sphere have both the same circumference and the same center as the sphere. A great circle is the largest circle that can be drawn on a given sphere.) How can this be done?

Hovering

Xenonians Alison and Amelia live fourteen miles apart. Alison started to drive her hovercar toward Amelia’s house. At about the same time Amelia started to drive toward Alison’s hovercar. When they met, Alison had been driving for three times as long as Amelia and at 3/5 Amelia’s rate. How many miles had Amelia driven when they met?

Sam Bellotto Jr.