plasmid

Not any of those. The answer should have features that make it reasonably obvious that the clues are describing that answer; from the mother and father thing, to the flattened face and churning stomach (of the subject of the riddle and not the imbiber), to the "failing brain", to the clue about poison that's released only when threatened.

Getting on the right track, pg. I'll give that one credit for the maternal loyalty and paternal forsaken-ness clue, as I believe their reproductive process leads to "mothers" and/or "daughters". I can't see enough of a fit for the flattened face with churning stomach clue when referring to the "I" of the riddle to call it an acceptable alternative answer though. If it goes another week or two without being solved or getting closer then I think I'll reveal the answer and the facts needed to find it, and count yours as the best answer so far.

If you move N squares diagonally, do you consider that the same as moving N squares horizontally or vertically because the same number of squares are visited, or longer because you travel a distance that is longer by a factor of sqrt(2)? Also want to see bonanova's path. I reached a different (smaller) answer, operating under the first condition of having diagonal moves count the same as horizontal and vertical moves.

Not the unspeakable one. While he's certainly forsaken by his father, I'm not aware of anything that could be interpreted as maternal loyalty. And the flattened face with churning stomach clue wouldn't be very convincingly explained. Some semi-specialized knowledge that's required to interpret the clues might be making this one inordinately difficult, which could make this an educational riddle once it's solved.

Not a tablet, there are a couple of clues pointing toward something else. In particular: the first two lines about mom and dad wouldn't be explained with a pill, and lines 7-8 where it becomes important to remember that it's the "I" in this riddle who's talking. Although the person swallowing a pill might have their stomach churn, with the "What am I?" variety of riddle the "I" is the thing to be guessed, so a pill would not have its own stomach churn while its face remains smooth.

There were two questions posed. 1) Can you clear out a peg? 2) How would you do it? A little surprisingly, I can answer the second question but not the first.

Thanks for kicking this one off, bonanova. Not any movie characters -- I tend to not riddle about things from pop culture that might not be known by a majority of the population. This riddle does use a clue that might not be known by a fair number of people, but it's only important for understanding a clue and not the subject of the riddle.

It's true that it's solvable, but it's meant to be a test case to see if a general algorithm for finding an answer would be able to handle it, and to show how such an algorithm would be implemented in practice. Post 17 spoke of scaling by a common multiple of the irrational value, but in this test case not all terms are a multiple of the irrational value since one of them is just 2.

(4)*(2) + (-1)*(2pi) + (-2)*(4-pi) = (8) + (-2pi) + (-8 + 2pi) = 0 Solving for pi... a(2) + b(2pi) + c(4-pi) = 0 2a + 2b*pi + 4c - c*pi = 0 2a + 4c + (2b-c)pi = 0 implies 2b-c = 0, which it does

I'm not sure those solutions would work, but maybe I just don't completely follow them. Could you show an example of application to the numbers {2, 2pi, 4-pi}?

Still loyal to my mother's tribe By father I'm forsaken My independent life imbibed In massive gullet taken Within the beast who on me fed The rank miasma burns My flattened face belies my dread Beneath, my stomach churns I plot revenge with failing brain Concoct a poison dire If threatened, shall I loose the bane Beware this man of fire

I got a different answer.

Apologies about bumping a topic, but now that BMAD and some newer faces are around, I was wondering if we could get a hint or a fresh set of eyes on this problem.

I would agree with gavinksong that...

Do the kids also have the option to not make a flag?

Does Bob lose anything to Alice or Charlie if he guesses wrong?

There's no need to have Bayes meddling with this problem. Well, I suppose you could say that it implicitly relies on Bayesian analysis in a way that I just don't draw attention to in this approach.

I'm not sure we're completely understanding each other, but here goes.

If you were to make 2*N cuts of 91 degrees, would that give you the same outcome as making N cuts of 182 degrees? (Suppose N is 3 for example.) Or are you saying something else?

Now I don't feel so bad about resorting to writing a program. Assuming this isn't buggy, which is sort of hit-or-miss, it seems like you can accumulate a ton of transitions before they start going away. And for the case of a (nearly irrational) slice size of 11.72347 degrees, it takes over eighteen hundred flips for the cake to remove all of its transitions. Glad I didn't try to work that out by hand. Every angle I've tested so far eventually destroys all of the transitions (so reaches an all-up or all-down state), but I'm afraid it's not as enlightening as I'd hoped about the underlying process and providing an explanation on why it must eventually reach such a state. See post #30 for an explanation of the logic behind this program. Its output has two lines for every flip, the first line is the location of the transitions in terms of coefficients of slice size (since every transition will occur at some multiple of the slice size), and the second line shows the locations of the transitions in terms of degrees.

To make sure the rules about maze size vs memory are clear: Does that mean that we should be able to come up with an algorithm such that, given any maze of finite size, we should be able to define some finite amount of memory that would be sufficient for the robot to find the flags in that maze, but both the maze size and amount of memory could become arbitrarily large? Or is it saying that we should be able to come up with an algorithm that will always succeed with some fixed amount of memory for any arbitrarily large maze, without needing to scale up the memory as the maze gets larger? If it's the former, then the robot could just draw a map of the maze in its memory as it progresses. If it's the latter, then the problem is essentially asking for a strategy along the lines of the "always follow the right-sided wall" where you don't need to keep track of all of the previous moves, but which will get you to every open square of the maze.