Fixed some links between puzzles (Node Maze 2, Light Addition, No Left Turn, Wave Addition, and Wind Farm Puzzle 6). With these corrections, and the updated logic problems, puzzles from Imagine issues 12.1 through 12.5 (2004–2005), and issues 14.4 through 16.2 (2007–2008) are linked together through the navigation bar at the top of each page. (All of these puzzles are either on website versions 6 or 7.)
In my blog entries, I discovered I was using both “web site” and “website”. The Grammarist suggests that “website” is the commonly accepted usage (unless you are the New York Times), so I’ve updated prior blog posts to be consistent (including this one).
Recently joining other perennial autumn traditions, like apple picking and football games, are corn mazes. Visiting a corn maze is a quintessential fall activity, at least where I’m from (the midwestern United States). There are a wide variety of corn mazes, differing in size, style, design, and solving objective.
One of the many reasons I wanted to start a blog for Knossos Games was to write about corn mazes. Even with the widespread popularity of the burgeoning industry of agritourism, there is a surprising lack of commentary and analysis surrounding corn mazes. I’d like to change that.
For this first post, here is the single most useful resource for corn mazes: a directory where you can find a corn maze near you. This list is compiled by one of the few corn maze design companies, but is assembled as a service to the entire industry. As with any list, check to make sure your local maze is open and operating this season before heading out.
I knew that updating the logic problems for the new website would be a big task. Several logic problems were never posted to the last version of the website, and those that were still needed updated graphics and, in some cases, updated detailed solutions. I decided to break the logic problem update into pieces, so that I could better manage the work and post updates more frequently. The first update was back in March, 2015. Here’s what’s new in the second update:
Logic problem #6 – Marbles All the changes here were to the detailed solution explanation. Some of the language was clarified. A mathematical error found in one of the explanation’s graphics was corrected. The biggest change was replacing an argument concerning the divisibility of the number of Andrew’s marbles with a more direct fractional explanation. This not only made the explanation more straightforward (with new equation graphics), but also enabled me to provide an explanation of (commonly misunderstood) fraction multiplication in the solution.
Logic problem #7 – Corn Maze From the second update group, this problem needed the most work. Since I wanted this particular puzzle to appear in the fall in order to introduce a recurring blog feature on corn mazes, it also set a timeframe for when the entire update should be posted.
Undertaking a major update to the website presents opportunities to make significant changes, as well as fixing minor yet thorny problems. The graphic for the corn maze was the latter. At the time this puzzle was originally made (Fall 2006), my unsophisticated knowledge of Adobe Illustrator meant that I wasn’t capable of designing an acceptable corn maze graphic, one that would look like an actual corn maze from above. My aunt, who is a writer and artist, graciously stepped in to help. I sent her the outline of the maze and she sent back an illustration in the style that she uses for her books.
This is what was published in the magazine and what I posted on the website until now. Although I am grateful to my aunt for her assistance, I was never completely satisfied with the result. (One thing I absolutely love, however, is that bridge.) It just didn’t look like a corn maze to me, although it took me a long time to figure out why I felt that way.
The main issue, I realized, was that the path size to corn size ratio was incorrect. A corn maze has thin paths compared to the patches of corn separated by those paths1. The outline of the maze I originally designed had a path size to corn size ratio of 1:1, that’s what my aunt used as a template for the above illustration, and that didn’t look right. With thinner paths, the corn maze would feel appropriately bigger.
Even after I had identified this problem, fixing it was still a challenge. I first attempted to draw the new, skinnier paths on a green background representing the corn, but could not get the path corners to appear correctly rounded, as they would in an actual corn maze. After exhausting much time and effort on that method, I then decided to try a different approach, using expanded versions of the patches of corn on a background of brown dirt. The gaps in the patches of corn would thus result in the paths. Rounding the corners of the corn patches that do not have straight edges was still a challenge, since this is not natively supported in Adobe Illustrator 6 and earlier. After exploring my options, I ultimately chose to use the Round Any Corner script, which has mysteriously disappeared in the past few days.
One of the other issues I had with the original illustration was the stroke weight of the details representing the corn. I think my aunt’s intent was to represent the leafy texture of the corn plant, but photos of corn mazes show a more grainy texture where those details of the individual plants all blend together. Thus, I wanted to make my corn maze illustration have this sort of texture as well. While I was satisfied with the textures I could apply in Illustrator, I have not figured out how to successfully export these to an SVG file (so that the texture will still appear sharp on high-resolution displays). Thus, I dropped the textures altogether, as you can see above.
Finally, neither a graphical illustration of the correct solution nor a detailed solution for the problem were ever posted on the website. I had never actually thought through a detailed solution at the time I created the puzzle, so all of that needed to be worked out as well. It was tricky to figure out how to represent the path segments graphically in a way that didn’t need a lot of explanation. I also wanted a way to show the choices you needed to consider in picking which path segment to use next. The solution path shown is made up of several pieces, layered below the corn patches and above the brown dirt background. The toughest part here was getting the correct path thickness at splits and intersections. There is an intersection that is visited twice, and in order to clearly communicate which way you turn the solution path shouldn’t intersect or overlap itself there.
Logic problem #8 – Flight Plans The solution graphics were slightly modified to better support non-high resolution displays. This problem was one of the first to be written after the sixth version of the website debuted, and as such required few updates.
Logic problem #9 – Writer’s Group Increased the size of the graphics representing the circular table at which the authors meet, mostly to support a larger, more legible font. Also brought the table to the foreground to make the author positions (circles) look more like chairs, and to better highlight the two important author positions (poetry, screenplay) that are rotated midway through the solution to find non-problematic overlapping positions of clues.
Logic problem #10 – Castaway, Part 2 To better match the overall aesthetic of the website, reduced the stroke weight for the stick-figure graphics representing the rules on how the castaways lie to each other. I fixed the gradient backgrounds representing in-progress groupings in the detailed solution (or rather, I learned how to create them properly). The solution graphic font was changed to be more legible. Name cards, matching those from the updated first Castaway logic puzzle, were added to the solution graphic. Finally, a minor error in the detailed solution (switched a name) was corrected.
The third, final, and largest update to the logic problems is still to come. There is a lot of work that needs to be done in order to bring that group of logic problems to the website for the very first time, so it will take quite a while to complete. In the meantime, enjoy these problems and others on the site!
Problem: I’m always concerned about how the layout and general presentation of the website visually communicates how one navigates around the site. It occurred to me that the header and sidebar graphics use a consistent visual language while having inconsistent behavior. Sometimes these graphics are links that are clickable/tappable, and sometimes these graphics simply announce the next section of a page.
This isn’t as much of a problem on a computer with a mouse, since the site uses rollovers. But as more and more people use touchscreen devices, rollovers cannot be depended upon to communicate information. (On a computer, there is a difference between a point and a tap, whereas on a touchscreen, there is no difference between a point and a tap.)
Solution: By modifying the CSS and replacing a few of the navigation graphics, all clickable/tappable header graphics are now shown as buttons.
I maintained the visual language of the navigation bar, which uses lighter colors as buttons which turn darker when clicked/tapped.
The rollovers themselves use a clever trick that creates a quick, responsive change when pointing/tapping. The header graphic has an actual height of 72px, but the CSS specifies the displayed height as only half of this. This means that only half the graphic will be visible at any one time. Which half? When the graphic is originally displayed, it is aligned to the “top”, so the top half displays. When you point/tap, the graphic is aligned to the “bottom”, so the bottom half displays. Since both halves of the graphic are contained within the same file, the rollover/tap action is as fast as your browser can redraw the change (instead of as fast as your internet connection can download a new file).
Fixed: All-around misbehavior in touch interfaces (WebKit)
Problem: Oh, where to begin. I have noticed consistent differences between the computer version of the website and the touch-screen (WebKit) version of the website. In iOS 7, a tap showed a delayed behavior attached to a rollover. However, in iOS 8 and 9, that behavior was gone completely. Most of the offending behavior can be best summarized in the following graphic, which shows what happened when you tapped a rollover button.
Solution: I initially had no idea why this was happening. Turns out, this was a combination of two problems. First, WebKit displays a grey box around a tap target that contains a link. While I found this acceptable for text links, I didn’t want this for the navigational buttons, puzzle swaths, and headers on the site. It either produced a large grey box covering the entire (linked) graphic, or, as seen above, produced a tiny grey circle when it though no link was present. Fortunately, there is a way to turn this off. (The second line, apparently, is for some Android devices.)
Second, the rollover was no longer being triggered by a tap, as it had been previously (if only fleetingly). The solution here, admittedly a hack, is to insert specific code in the HTML document to activate the “hover” style. The “ontouchstart” and “ontouchend” in the example below do absolutely nothing, other than trigger the “hover” style in the associated CSS. (It won’t work to insert this or some other code on the CSS end, since the tap never triggers the “hover” style, so the CSS document itself is never accessed.) Again, I chose this over a fancier solution using JavaScript.
Workaround: When saving Adobe Illustrator files as SVG, be sure to specify in the Options (save) window Fonts > Type > Convert to outline. This results in larger files sizes, and still doesn’t always work for some reason. For example, the coin box graphic for Logic problem #1 fails to render properly in Firefox. This makes no sense whatsoever, since the font is no longer a font: it is a vector object shape. But Firefox still renders it inappropriately.
Ever since the features of Apple’s iOS 9 were announced, there has been muchdiscussion surrounding the software’s ability to block ads. Now seems to be a good time to discuss several interconnected issues related to my website, starting with how I monetize the traffic flow and page views.
Simply put, I don’t. The business model for Knossos Games is that there is no business model. Knossos Games has always been presented free of advertisements. I intend to keep it that way. Ads on the web (and generally in life) have gotten way out of control, to the detriment of the entire experience. When you come to the Knossos Games website looking for quality puzzles, that’s what I want you to find. Nothing more, nothing less.
So how can I afford to do this? CTY and Imagine pay me for each submission to the magazine as a regular contributor, and they graciously let me retain the copyright for my work. Even so, the puzzles and the website are a hobby and not my main occupation, and as such I don’t rely on them for my main source of income. As an educator, I believe that knowledge wants to be free (in every sense of the word), and I want my work to be as accessible as possible. A long time ago I decided, in exchange for their payment, the magazine and its readers would get an exclusive window of opportunity to see my work before it is posted to the website. If you really enjoy Knossos Games and have a little money to spare, please consider buying a subscription to the magazine.
There are two things on the website, however, that some people might consider advertising. First, there are frequent links back to CTY and Imagine. I am grateful to them for giving me a nationally-published puzzle column in their magazine that I retain the rights to, so can you blame me? That being said, I get no direct income from those links and honestly have no idea if they have any impact whatsoever on web traffic to their site, interest in their programs, or increased readership of the magazine.
Second, when I mention on this blog a relevant puzzle book that I think you might like to read, I insert an Amazon Affiliate link. I do not intend to ever clutter up the main website with these links, or host the barrage of Amazon advertisements included in their program on the website or the blog. (Notice that I’m not even linking to Amazon within this post.) Each blog post link is clearly identified as such with a rollover. I can report that, in the first ten months of using Amazon Affiliate links, I’ve posted a grand total of two of them, and made zero dollars from them. Do yourself a favor and buy the books from your local bookstore after using Amazon to see the details.
Part 2: Traffic Analysis and Privacy
Your privacy is important. I want to be completely transparent as to what information I collect about those who read Knossos Games. I’m not a lawyer, but I wanted a privacy policy for the site, so here it is.
As I alluded to above, I have no information about subscribers to the magazine. I wouldn’t want it if it was offered to me. My editor has told me that Knossos Games has a small but loyal fan base, and this seems to be good enough to keep Knossos Games in print. If you are a long-time reader of the puzzle column, thank you!
I use three methods to collect anonymous information about visitors to the website. The first, which I’ve used for many years, is JavaScript code at the end of each puzzle website page (but not the blog) that sends information to StatCounter. The other two, which I started using in July 2015, are server-side tracking features for the puzzle website and the blog: Webalizer and AWStats. Both of these provide slightly different analytics from each other, and different from StatCounter. Together, these three services provide me with basic information about visitors to the website, such as: how you navigated to my website, what pages you visited, how long you browsed the website, and information about your location and device (screen size, operating system, and browser). If you are interested, all three services provide a complete listing of the data they collect at their respective websites. I do not get any information that would identify you personally, nor would I ever want to seek out that information.
Why do I want this basic information? Part of my motivation is simply curiosity. After years of having this website, it’s still thrilling for me to see that someone visited from very far away. Another part is to ensure that your experience on the site is a good one. Is the site coded and formatted in such a way so that your device can load it properly? Page views specifically help me determine what puzzles are popular and how people navigate the site. For example, featuring puzzles on the homepage unsurprisingly results in far more visitors to those puzzles. Knowing how people navigated to the site helps me understand how people find out about Knossos Games. Most traffic used to come in via links from CTY and Imagine, along with a few third-party blog posts that were highly ranked in Google searches for triangular or isometric graph paper. Now, almost all traffic is from the organization Hoagies’ Gifted, which links to Knossos Games under brain teasers and puzzles. (Much of this shift in traffic is due to broken links to the old website, unfortunately.)
What do I do with this basic information? I use it to make the site better. I only check it occasionally, most often when I need to make design decisions about the site. I would never use this information to advertise (see part 1), nor would I ever sell this information to others for them to advertise to you. If you are concerned about your information being collected through these means, from my website and others, I would encourage you to use internet anonymization tools.
Part 3: Is JavaScript necessary?
With so much obtrusive advertising and traffic analysis on the web, JavaScript ad blockers and people turning off JavaScript altogether are becoming more prevalent. This has been possible from the desktop and Android for some time, but Apple’s iOS 9 has raised the collective consciousness surrounding ad blocking. Regardless of whether this is good or bad, or the effects it will ultimately have, I’m trying to move away from relying on JavaScript wherever I can. I want to provide a baseline, excellent experience on my website using HTML5 and CSS3, only adding JavaScript to further enhance that experience.
This is why I chose a few months ago to add Webalizer and AWStats analytics in addition to the free StatCounter service I had been using for years. These two new services get their data directly from the server and do not rely on JavaScript whatsoever. Another example: in recently tinkering with the splash page, I embedded a link to the homepage within the graphic, in case the automatic JavaScript forwarding fails. Yet another example: I found a clever CSS technique to create step-by-step slideshows for the Space Podssolutionsthat completely avoids JavaScript.
It is unclear to me how this situation with JavaScript and ad blocking will shake out in the months and years ahead. But I will continue to look for ways to create a complete experience solely through HTML5 and CSS3, only then adding JavaScript for additional features.
During the summer of 2007, I was moving from Madison, WI, where I had just completed my graduate studies, to Dayton, OH, where I would be starting my first college professor job. To this day, I still remember driving down I-65 through northwest Indiana and seeing for the first time, with my own eyes, a wind farm. Rows and rows and rows of wind turbines stretching for as far as you could see. Even going 70 mph, it still takes a solid 10 minutes to drive through the Meadow Lake Wind Farm, which has an operational capacity of 500 Megawatts.
Once it had occurred to me to use a wind farm as the basis of an environmental puzzle, I needed to figure out how such a puzzle would really work. The details of the puzzle, like the T-shaped footprint and “windier areas”, are loosely based on how wind farms are actually built. In reality, the windiness across wind farm areas is generally quite consistent at any one time, with altitude and access to the power grid more critical to wind turbine placement.
The solution strategy for these puzzles is based on an incomplete tiling of the T-shaped turbine footprints. You can tesselate these shapes to maximize the number of turbines; however, that regular tessellation (or complete tiling) is disrupted by the irregular footprint meeting the straight boundary of the land. Plus the windier areas give some incentive to shift the pattern around, or break it up entirely, so long as you do not lose too many turbines in the process. Many of the earlierpuzzles I wrote maximized the use of the windier areas, so that every turbine could be placed (in only one way) on those areas. Later puzzles shifted away from this line of thinking and towards using the interlocking tessellation itself as a constraint to create a maximum number of turbines that could be placed in windier areas.
Whenever I come up with a new idea for a puzzle, I try to create several of that type of puzzle at the same time, and the wind farm puzzles were no exception. But due to poor planning on my part, I was running out of suitable puzzles for the magazine from the group of puzzles I had originally created. So the first task was to reorganize the available puzzles and fill holes in the lineup by creating some new wind farm puzzles. Thus, for example, the puzzle originally labeled as #4 is now #6. This also meant that some puzzles that were “website exclusives” were taken down, since they are now included in my plans for what will be published in the future. Even though a couple of puzzles were removed from the website, there are now more wind farm puzzles available than ever before. Plus I now have a batch of wind farm puzzles for future publication in suitable issues of the magazine.
Until today, the correct solution to each wind farm puzzle was based on the nonspecific instruction of arranging the turbines to produce the most energy. I always felt that the solver should have a good reason to understand why their solution must produce the most units of energy, but that level of understanding can be difficult to achieve. Concerned that some solvers would never be confident that they had found the solution, all puzzles now include a “good, better, best” energy unit rating scale. This gives the solver some idea of what they should be shooting for when arranging the turbines. This was inspired by mobilegames I’ve seen that include a three star rating system for each level. The scale (different for each puzzle) is taken from various possible turbine arrangements, with “best” representing the absolute maximum amount of energy producible.
In addition to the solution, my goal is to always give some sort of solution explanation or problem space, depending on the type of puzzle. When the wind farm puzzles debuted on the website, they did not include detailed solutions. It took a lot of thinking and effort to figure out the simplest way to communicate how we can be sure that the best solution is, in fact, the best. I’m pleased to say that all wind farm puzzles now include detailed solution explanations of how to achieve the best energy output. Some of these (I’m looking at you Puzzle 10) took many attempts to figure out how to clearly and concisely explain the solution. I hope that these and other detailed solutions provide you with a helpful way of thinking about the puzzles.
An ongoing catalogue of Knossos Games website issues and minor updates.
Updated WordPress through v4.3.
Added footnotes plugin Easy Footnotes. This enables unobtrusive updates to older blog posts, such as this one (where I wanted to convey that the puzzle mentioned has now been posted).
Minor updates were necessary to the Logic Problems, Part 1update. First, the Logic problem #1 coin box graphic had the same issues encountered by the Space Pods graphics. The same workaround was successfully applied, although I continue to be perplexed as to what the underlying problem is. I also increased the font size for the graphics in the solution for Logic problem #4 so as to be more readable, especially on lower resolution displays. Finally, the PDFs for each puzzle were updated to the version 7 website design, which I neglected to do in the original update.
Fixed: Links between Knossos Games puzzles and blog entries
Problem: Blog entries about specific puzzles link back to those puzzles. However, visitors who surf directly to the puzzles may not know about the blog entries about those puzzles. Up to now, links from puzzles back to blog entires have been haphazardly posted. Need an organized way to add links from puzzle web pages back to blog posts. This is necessitated by the origin story blog entires for each logic puzzle, whereas past origin story blog entries were for entire groups of puzzles (which were easier to track and link).
Solution: This is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. Each puzzle web page needs to be posted first, then the accompanying blog entry can be created which links back to the puzzle. Once the blog entry is generated (and the link is fixed), the web page for the puzzle can be linked back to the blog entry. It took me a little while to recognize that this is the necessary order of things, but now that I have, I’ve added this process to my workflow for each puzzle or website update.
html {
background: url(../splash/splash.svg) no-repeat center center fixed;
-webkit-background-size: cover;
-moz-background-size: cover;
-o-background-size: cover;
background-size: cover;}
This code takes a background image, centers it in both directions, and (using code specific to each browser) resizes it so that the image covers at least the size of the browser window top-to-bottom or left-to-right.
While this achieved my original objective for the splash page, it also presented certain problems. In order to cover the largest possible screens, the graphic had to be huge. But for small screens, such as mobile devices (with fixed data plans), a big graphic makes little sense. (The splash page redirected to the homepage after a few seconds, so if your data connection was lousy, it would simply skip the load.) In addition, the size of the swaths was not consistent between screen sizes/devices, or between the splash page and the rest of the website, because of the resizing.
Solution: Instead of the edge-to-edge graphic for the splash page, there is now a five swath by five swath graphic that is centered in both directions based on the specific size of the graphic (css stylesheet code):
This new graphic maintains the size of swaths across the entire site regardless of screen size, and it is smaller by a full megabyte. If the screen isn’t wide or tall enough to display the full image, it’s simply cut off. If the screen is wider or taller than the image, there is empty white space. The splash page still automatically redirects to the homepage, but a link is now embedded in the graphic if the page loads quickly and you feel tired of waiting (or if javascript has been turned off).
I contemplated many different solutions to this problem. One possible solution, which I may still try at some point, is to include different sizes of graphics for the splash page, and serving the best size for each particular device. This can be accomplished using javascript.
Continuing aggravation: Drop shadows in svg files do not properly display in Safari
Problem: In recreating the splash page graphic, specifically the drop shadow for the “featured in Imagine magazine” text overlay, I ran into a known issue in Safari: drop shadows in svg files do not properly display. Somehow, someway, I figured out how to trick Safari into displaying the drop shadow in the original, large splash graphic. But I could not figure out how I did this when recreating the image. Absolutely nothing worked.
Solution: After beating my head against the wall, I made a drop shadow by simply offsetting the text as black and translucent. (Nothing was done to blur the boundary, since that too has trouble rendering in Safari.) I’ll continue to revisit this issue as I change the new splash graphic to reflect current updates and featured puzzles.
This puzzle is based on the television show Survivor, in case you hadn’t already guessed. During the first season, I was completely hooked. There were many things about the show I found to be deeply intriguing: the simplicity and naiveté in the first iteration, the questions of how the editing of footage and the scripting of challenges affected the “reality” of the situation, and the basic morality play of the different characters and how they interacted. It was a completely contrived yet ultimately legitimate social experiment. Many of these issues have been thoroughly explored (and exploited) in the subsequent versions of the show and the many, many reality television shows that have followed.
The format of 16 people voted off one at a time seemed to be a perfect basis for a puzzle, but it wasn’t initially clear how to construct a puzzle around that idea. I didn’t set out to write another “truth tellers and liars” type puzzle, since those were thoroughly explored, and in my opinion perfected, by mathematician Raymond Smullyan in What Is the Name of This Book? and the follow-up The Lady or the Tiger? If you like these types of puzzles, you definitely need to get those books. Ultimately, I thought the large number of participants involved plus the mix of people who sometimes tell the truth and sometimes lie (which Smullyan refers to as normals) added something unique to the genre.
I wrote the puzzle during the summer of 2000, about four episodes into that first season of Survivor. Because of publishing deadlines, I had to write the puzzle before I knew the outcome of the show, even though it would be printed after the season had concluded. This turned into something of a moral dilemma. How should I characterize the winner? Should they be honest or deceitful? What will it take to win? This all pertained to how I balanced out the true and false statements. I finally decided that the puzzle would work on the assumption that the further a person got in the game, the more likely they would be to lie, not necessarily to the other contestants, but to the media or the viewer at home (to whom the clues have been given). In retrospect, my prediction seems pretty good.
I considered many ways in which to construct the clues, such as basing them on gender and the two competing tribes. The gender clues were in the puzzle until the final revision, at which point I found them to be unnecessary. I decided against using information about who belonged to which tribe, or mergers or immunity challenge results, because I wasn’t certain how the real game would work after the tribes merged. When I wrote the puzzle, I wasn’t sure when or even if a merger would occur.
Coming up with names for people in logic problems is always a challenge, and in this case I needed sixteen of them (that had to be different from those on the show). Since I run into this problem quite often, whenever I see an interesting name, I make a mental note of it for the future. After submitting the puzzle, Carol Blackburn (my editor at the time) zeroed in on the conspicuous “Eutaw” and correctly suspected that the names were all lifted from streets (or abbreviated versions thereof) in downtown Baltimore, the home office of Imagine magazine. I had been there the previous summer and saw the sign for Eutaw Street, which borders Camden Yards, while I was at a Baltimore Orioles baseball game. When it came time to turn the generic placeholder names used in creating the puzzle into actual names, I grabbed the map from my trip and started listing off street names. There were more male names than female names, thus Holliday, Chase, Madison, and Eutaw all became women. It also meant I had to keep checking that I was using the correct pronouns, because I often forgot which gender went with which name.
Writing the detailed solution was excruciating because I kept mixing up the tenses. You see, just like on the show, these people are saying these statements in the present, but are referring to things which happened in the past. So I have to refer to the people saying their statements in the present tense, but anything said in the statements about who’s kicking off whom has to be in the past tense. Things became even more tangled when I had to refer to previous steps in the solution method, which were before the present, but after the contest. Confused? I sure was.
In editing the solution for the latest revision of the website, I discovered a more efficient solution, which made some of the clues redundant. This new version is the one currently posted to the website. More details about the rationale for the change and the eliminated clues can be found here.
You’ll also note that this puzzle is titled “Castaway, Part 1”. Part 2 was written ten years later for the Philosophy issue (v17.n4, March/April 2010), when I again felt it would be appropriate to revisit the ethical and moral issues brought up on Survivor. That puzzle will be featured and discussed in the next set of updates for the Logic puzzles.
While the two-year garden logic puzzle was written while I was teaching at the Bethlehem, PA (Moravian College) CAA site during the summer of 1999, the idea for the puzzle came on a bus ride.
There was a lot of time to look at the passing corn fields while on my frequent Van Galder bus trips between Madison, WI and O’Hare Airport in Chicago. It made me think of the huge vegetable garden I helped my dad with every year when I was growing up. I remembered the plans he’d draw up in the winter, with paper and pencil in one hand and the seed guide in the other. The time spent planting in the spring. Fighting the weeds. Too much rain, then not enough. And finally, the big fall harvest. Those backyard experiences were the inspiration for this puzzle, where the layout of the crops had to be reconstructed from scribblings on the backs of seed packets. I went through several lists of possible crops to use, trying to find common vegetables that could be found in someone’s little garden or a large farm.
You might have noticed that the title of the puzzle is the “two-year” garden puzzle. My first attempt was a three year version that occupied twelve plots in a four by three grid. After testing it out on some of my best students that summer, I realized that puzzle was really, really tough. So I created this two-year, nine-plot version. It works basically the same, but is quite a bit easier. I still have the three-year version. It’ll turn up eventually.
Finally, those students from the summer of ’99 read the instructions and immediately changed “a farmer” to “Farmer Tim”. I do have a bit of a green thumb from all those years of helping my dad, but I didn’t keep the change since I consider myself a farmer. I kept it because they insisted!