Quizzes & Puzzles16 mins ago
Listener 4256 - Boxes By Radix
52 Answers
Oh my goodness.
What an incredible feat from Radix. I have not been able to put this down since I got a foothold in - the construction, symmetry and elegance make the mind boggle. I am slightly ashamed that I used a late-twentieth-century technique to make headway, and (for the moment) I cannot imagine how I could have completed it otherwise.
Truly humbling. Thanks, Radix. I think I can now understand what people see in numericals!
What an incredible feat from Radix. I have not been able to put this down since I got a foothold in - the construction, symmetry and elegance make the mind boggle. I am slightly ashamed that I used a late-twentieth-century technique to make headway, and (for the moment) I cannot imagine how I could have completed it otherwise.
Truly humbling. Thanks, Radix. I think I can now understand what people see in numericals!
Answers
I was holed up in Malaysia with only a basic calculator and an awful lot of paper and pencil and can confirm that it was possible to work this out with nothing more sophisticate d. A couple of long haul flights with nothing much else to do certainly helped and, by the end, I had become much more cunning about working which possibilitie s to pursue for the individual...
22:57 Sat 31st Aug 2013
Well, that was an effort. About the hardest Listener numerical I have solved. Took me about a day of fairly continuous concentration. It would have been much easier to solve if I could have remembered how to write programs in BASIC (shows my age!). Having filled in a few squares which were reasonably obvious, I used EXCEL a lot, but never more than 600 lines or so in solving a clue. How did Radix manage to get it to end with such a neat and apposite word?
Has anyone managed to complete this without using anything more advanced than a calculator? Those who have completed it are awe-struck by its elegance, and I would love to share their joy. But having no skill with spreadsheets I fear it may be beyond me. I'm not willing to slog through thousands of squarings and addings, and judging from the time of the first posting a PC does it remarkably quickly. Perhaps it's a bit like being taken by helicopter to the top of Ben Nevis - the view is stunning but a machine did the work.
jockie, I think (for me) that's the $64,000 question. I used a computer (tragically, an old BBC 32k - I was staying up late looking after an elderly relative, and amazingly, they still had their old computer plugged in) and there is no doubt that it bypassed a lot of menial labour. As another poster asked - is this cheating? I doubt that the editors aren't trying to test the ability to write simple programs or use relatively complex spreadsheets.
On a second look, and with the benefit of hindsight, there are certainly some routes in based on deducing *parts* of answers, so I feel sure that there must be a more principled (and doubtless, satisfying) way of cracking this.
I still really enjoyed it. I like the helicopter analogy - though at least, I did build and fly the helicopter!
On a second look, and with the benefit of hindsight, there are certainly some routes in based on deducing *parts* of answers, so I feel sure that there must be a more principled (and doubtless, satisfying) way of cracking this.
I still really enjoyed it. I like the helicopter analogy - though at least, I did build and fly the helicopter!
I will be interested to see the model solution to this puzzle which will presumably be based on a calculator only approach.
Frankly I was not prepared to spend hours on a calculator when a few lines of Pascal did the trick. Don't be fooled into thinking that the program solved the puzzle for me - it didn't, all it did was save time with the donkey work: there was still much to do with the lists of possibilities.
To reiterate, I await their solution with interest!
Frankly I was not prepared to spend hours on a calculator when a few lines of Pascal did the trick. Don't be fooled into thinking that the program solved the puzzle for me - it didn't, all it did was save time with the donkey work: there was still much to do with the lists of possibilities.
To reiterate, I await their solution with interest!
Can someone recommend a version of WinCalc and somewhere to download it from? Really need to make some progress on the next couple of days! I have around 8 "obvious" cells, and a few narrowed down to 2 or 3 options, but not seeing anywhere else to go and typing questions in here is the extent of my computing expertise!
Thanks MonkMonk - [email protected]
Finally finished - thanks to using Excel. You can certainly enter a number of cells straight off, as TheBear69 said, and if you tackle the clues in the correct order, you can reduce the number of possibilities you have to try for other clues, but I reckon it would have taken me another 100 years just using a calculator! And I think I have RSI from overuse of the mouse scroll wheel.
I think I will now go and see if I can resurrect my extremely limited BBC Basic programming skills.
MHiggins - I don't want to give anything away on here, but every word of the preamble is there for a reason.
I think I will now go and see if I can resurrect my extremely limited BBC Basic programming skills.
MHiggins - I don't want to give anything away on here, but every word of the preamble is there for a reason.
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