Today’s puzzle is a single part of a mystery that comprises several smaller puzzles, styled on the cult classic TV show The Crystal Maze. To get the coordinates there is a “mental” test for the northings, two easy puzzles that I won’t go into here. The westings are the more interesting part, with a “skill” […]
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Plotting Pairs (GC4W6HJ)
Planning for a trip to Cornwall, I was churning through some mysteries there, largely picking them at random from the map. I worked my way through this one by hand, copying the puzzle into a text editor and separating the pairs manually before finally transferring it into RStudio and plotting the result. I moved on. […]
GC4XMN7 RR138 – 404 Found
It’s been a few weeks since I found a puzzle worth programming in R, so I turned back to the RR series in the east of England to see if there was another, and there is. The cache page shows a quite unilluminating image, mostly white with a couple of small characters. Opening the image […]
GC5GRBF RR175 – Polymath
There is a series of puzzle caches in the east of England with a great number of interesting abstract puzzles, some of which are R-able. Amongst this estimable collection is one which is itself a miniature collection of puzzles. I saw it yesterday and starting working on the fifteen small puzzles. As of writing this, […]
GCTV41 Magic Eye View
Remember Magic Eye pictures? It was a craze in the 1990s where you would get books of abstract Pollockesque images, and, using a special technique, you could see a “3D” image. The technique, which I could never properly master, was to see “through” the page, focusing your gaze on a point behind the paper. The […]
GC7X6EW MIND-BENDER
I stumbled upon a nice little puzzle in Gloucestershire, England: Arrange the numbers 1 to 16, so each two numbers next to each other, add up to a square number. (You can only use each number once). Devastatingly succinct. But potentially tricky. I reached out, as I always do, to R to help narrow the […]
GC7J2FG Thorney Ramble – a QuarteR way down
Today’s puzzle takes us to the south of England, and it looks to me like an obfuscated QR code. Not only is this hinted at in the title, with Q and R in upper case, but the binary starts with a string of seven 1s. That’s a great heuristic for spotting this kind of QR-obfuscation. […]
GC4F5HY Shredded – JPS09
This puzzle is in Jersey and features an image, which, judging by the colours and rough shape, is obviously a scrambled version of a map of Jersey. The text confirms that a map has been “shredded”, and your task is to unshred it. I’m intrigued to know how they did this in the first place […]
GC6CQT9 Denken tut nicht weh / myślenie nie boli – 06
This puzzle cache is in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. The description is in German and repeated in Polish. Annoyingly, the puzzle instructions are in an image, so you can’t copy and paste the text into translation software. I retyped the German text into Google Translate and got the gist of it. You have a weighing scales and […]
tidyverse
The tidyverse collection of packages is a suite of packages that simplifies a huge number of the commonest tasks I do in R. It’s become indispensable for me, and I’ll make heavy use of it. I draw your attention to dplyr, one of the tidyverse packages. It provides a set of functions that makes manipulating […]
