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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. […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]