Thursday, September 08, 2005

Sudoku

Sudoku's all the rage nowadays. Have attempted two thus far, completed one.

The word Sudoku means "single number" in Japanese. The first puzzle was created by Howard Garnes, a freelance puzzle constructor, in 1979. It was originally called Number Place.

Should appear in a quiz near you in the near future...

Friday, September 02, 2005

Queuriest - I

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QUEURIEST - I
Keep Guessing! --- Johnnie Guesser
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1. Here's to all you dedicated Googlers. What's the building in which Google's HQ is based called? You are allowed to google only if u get this one! ;-)
*

2. Question for hairy men? tell me what Occam's razor is.
*

3. Who was the first Indian cricketer to get a Man Of The Match in the World Cup?
*

4. What is Korsakoff's Syndrome? Cryptic clue: People who play golf and sum up their scores rarely get it!
*

5. From sick to verse!

The night has a thousand eyes,
The day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When its love is done.

Who's the poet?
*

6. Bland question. Who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1972?
*

7. Expand JRR as in JRR Tolkien.
*

8. Who called M.K. Gandhi "Mahatma Major" and himself "Mahatma Minor"?
*

9.Van Halen's first album with Sammy Hagar as lead singer was 5150. Now 5150 was used as a code for the criminally insane by the police. Their next album was called OU812. What's the story?
*

10. How many faces does a icosahedron have? Go ahead, sit on it.
*

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From: "SonOfDelphi"
Date: Sat Dec 7, 2002 12:33 am
Subject: Queuriest - I

hi everybody!

here's the first edition of Queuriest. Ten questions for you to crack. Answers in a week.
cool words to know: . . .phthisis. . . chthonian. . .looks like they've been misspelt huh?

thomas

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ANTI-GOOGLING SONG

lucifer is the light-giver
go ogle in the egg loo,
you'll get goo leg

evil one,
if you didn't get the first one
you deserve it.
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(To discourage googling for the answers. Some resorted to other search engines!)


ANSWERS
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From: "SonOfDelphi"
Date: Sat Dec 14, 2002 12:46 am
Subject: Answers to Queuriest - I

hi everybody!

Here are the answers to Queuriest -I.

well, about the name Queuriest. . .Pronounced kyooriyest. Inspired by `curiouser and curiouser!'. supposed to be curious-est contracted and spelled with Q (the best letter of them all! ). some of you thought it was supposed to be `queer'iest, and so came up with some queer answers. well?

about the words (did all of u know the meaning?)
-phthisis = Involving the lungs with progressive wasting of the body
-chthonian= Of the underworld

the literal meaning of lucifer is light-giver, really. i was not kidding in the anti-google poem . . .and luciferin is a pigment that's there in fireflies.

luv
thomas

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ANSWERS

>1. Googleplex.
It's at Mountain View, CA ? . . .and 1 followed by a googol zeroes is called a googol-plex. yawn? a googol is one followed by a hundred zeroes. ZZZZZZZ.....'googol' coined by Milton Sirotta, nine-year-old nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner.

>2. * It is the principle that explanations should not be unnecessarily complicated and that assumptions should not be needlessly multiplied. now that is very clear, is it not? ;-) ) I've been rather liberal on this one. Some of you mentioned this was the same as Principle Of Parsimony and that it is attributed to Willam Of Occam.

>3.* It was Farokh Engineer, in the match vs East Africa in WC'75 at Headingley
Most of you answered Bishan Singh Bedi for his superb spell of 12-8-6-1 in the same match but Engineer was the MoM. I wonder why though. He scored 54* but was not the topscorer either. Gavaskar got 65*. India won the match by 10 wickets.
Turned out to be the Chinaman of the quiz (since the googly was spotted)!

>4. * Dementia observed during the last stages of severe chronic alcoholism; involves loss of memory for recent events although long term memory is intact. (what did i just say?). Occurs due to Vit B1 (thiamine) deficiency. But mostly associated with alcoholism. Only few of you mentioned alcoholism. Only 0.5 if alcoholism not mentioned.
The clue could've ben worked out as -- people who golf tee, sum up score=total. so they could be called teetotallers? yuck, i feel ashamed about the clue now! so twisted. maybe i should've added something about amnesia as well. I'd meant to as well, but forgot!

>5. * Francis William Bourdillon. The poem is called Light.

>6.* Nobody. The prize money was allocated to the main fund of the Nobel foundation (why?)
This was supposed to be the googly of the quiz but was almost universally spotted! :-(
How I hate you, Google!

>7. * John Ronald Reuel

>8. * Eminently guessable, George Bernard Shaw. Most of you got it.

>9.* When spoken aloud, it sounds like "Oh You Ate One Too". This was a dig at their previous lead singer, David Lee Roth's solo album "Eat 'em and smile" which was released about the same time.

>10. * Twenty (20) . Polyhedron having twenty plane faces. Absolutely no controversy about this one!

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The scores (in chronological order)

Raghavendra Achar - 1 (the first! )
Sukhamaya - 7.5 (keep it up!)
Raghav Narayanan - 6.5 (don't know about ur query regarding women's WC. sorry.)
Shashi Shekar - (better luck next time.)
Rajesh Malviya - 1.5 (Your Hypermetropia of memory answer was way cool man!)
Ankur Jain - 9 (good going. keep it up!)
Venkateshwar KR - 2.5 (enjoyed the queery answers)
Vijay Anand Menon - 6 (good show boss)
Soumyadipta B - 3.5 (ur icosahedron has 2 faces? or did u mean 20? add 1 if that was so)
Binoj George - 7.5 (keep it up!)
Naveed Mohammed - 9 (got two .5s you didn't mention anything about DLR's album for 9 and no alcoholism in 4, sorry)
Sathish K - 7.5 (great show boss)
Kamal Rathi - 6 (thanx for the address of Google's HQ.)


* The Van Halen question was the least attempted question int the quiz. (Not too many Halen fans in here?)
* Most of the .5s are 'coz no mention of alcoholism in Korsakoff's syndrome. I know this is gonna be controversial but this tidbit was what i was looking for.
*Most wrongly answered question was the first Indian MoM at WC. Mohinder Amarnath.


DISCLAIMER: The QM's congratulatory remarks regarding the maintenance of the state of elevation* conditional to the respondent's abstinence from the use of deprecated extraneous assistance - automated or otherwise. All responses accepted as accurate transcriptions of the respondent's cranial contents. Reponses not matching aforementioned description, if any, constitute breach of trust and are deplored.

*=keep it up etc

Any inconvenience to genuine respondents as a result of this disclaimer is regretted.


Queuriest - Intro

Queuriest was a series of very "cluesy" quizzes that I ran on Quiznet 3 or 4 years back. If you like cryptic crossword puzzles, it's highly likely that you'll like this also.

The clues were blended into the questions - sometimes as separate clues and sometimes hidden in the framing of the questions. One would not be able to guess the answer from the clue without background knowledge but the clue would help churn out the creamy answer from the depths of your memory. And if one didn't know the answer, when one heard it, one had to have the I-should-have-got-it feeling.

I had a lot of fun compiling the questions and also reading the answers that came in. Be sure to read the comments on the posts as well. There were 10 episodes. It got curiouser and curiouser...

Check them out. These quizzes are also available on Quiznet. You can read the time-capsule versions there if you choose, instead of the retrospective versions here . The answers will be given as comments for each post.