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Topic: CALENDAR CUBES II (Read 8371 times) |
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Hobbes
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I don't see how this can be solved. To create the 12 months as specified, you need 19 distinct letters. Also, I don't think you can avoid duplicating at least one letter (A). You can't rotate the letters to form other letters (at least, not without a lot of fudging).
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Hobbes
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Never mind, I found the answer somewhere else. You do need to rotate (2) letters.
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Jeremiah Smith
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Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
« Reply #2 on: Aug 8th, 2002, 5:24pm » |
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Okay, I agonized over this for hours, until I found a solution online. Turns out, I had chosen the wrong pairs of letters to rotate. The answer calls for d/p and n/u to be the same face, just rotated.
The number one problem? The way the puzzle is presented here, the months are spelled in all capitals "(e.g. JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV DEC)", so I figured the letters on the cubes had to be in all caps too. But in order for the puzzle to work, they have to be lowercase.
I kept thinking of what letters could be rotated, in their uppercase forms. I got C and U, and E and M (tilt the E sideways to make a stylized M.) Neither worked...and since D can't rotate to P and N can't rotate to U, I was miles away from the answer...
Of course, maybe eventually I would have tried lowercase letters. But I'm not that brilliant.
Curse you, william wu! And your caps lock key!
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Paul Hammond
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Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
« Reply #3 on: Aug 8th, 2002, 6:19pm » |
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I got a solution of sorts using upper-case letters... it only really works in certain fonts, though.
C->U is a reasonable rotation, so I used that. I considered J->L (questionable, and it doesn't help anyway). The key was D->A (think of a "rounded" upper-case A and a D with big serifs). That did the trick.
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| « Last Edit: Aug 8th, 2002, 6:35pm by Paul Hammond » |
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william wu
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Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
« Reply #4 on: Aug 8th, 2002, 6:23pm » |
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on Aug 8th, 2002, 5:24pm, jeremiahsmith wrote:
Curse you, william wu! And your caps lock key! |
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Hehe.
The solution sent to me by the contributor, Bruce Preston, uses only capital letters. And it works! So I guess we could have two versions of this problem. One that uses only capital letters, and one that uses lower case letters. Thanks for bringing attention to this distinction! 
Key parts of the all-caps solution: Rotate U 180 degrees to get a sans-serif N. Rotate U 90 degrees clockwise to get a sans-serif C.
Glad to hear that I'm driving you crazy
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Jeremiah Smith
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Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
« Reply #5 on: Aug 8th, 2002, 6:24pm » |
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I suppose if you tried hard enough, you could shove a lot of letters together, and thus do this puzzle in many different ways... I thought about using V and A on the same face, using a stylized A without the crossbar and hoping the general outline of the shape would suffice to communicate the letter "A".
What it boils down to, then, is "How fancy are you willing to make your letters?"
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| « Last Edit: Aug 8th, 2002, 6:25pm by Jeremiah Smith » |
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Jeremiah Smith
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Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
« Reply #6 on: Aug 8th, 2002, 6:27pm » |
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on Aug 8th, 2002, 6:23pm, william wu wrote:| Key parts of the all-caps solution: Rotate U 180 degrees to get a sans-serif N. Rotate U 90 degrees clockwise to get a sans-serif C. |
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Still, though, the upside-down U is technically n, not N.
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| « Last Edit: Aug 8th, 2002, 6:29pm by Jeremiah Smith » |
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william wu
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Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
« Reply #7 on: Aug 8th, 2002, 6:38pm » |
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on Aug 8th, 2002, 6:27pm, jeremiahsmith wrote:
Still, though, the upside-down U is technically n, not N.
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Hmm, I guess you're right. Well, it all depends on how flexible you are with your fonts. I'll add a footnote about case considerations.
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Lewis Jones
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Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
« Reply #8 on: Aug 9th, 2002, 12:45pm » |
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Only one (capital) letter needs to be rotated. Discard the letter M. When that letter is required, rotate the letter E 90 degrees clockwise. It has been suggested that this "wouldn't work." Why not? No three-letter abbreviation calls for both an E and an M.
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Paul Hammond
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Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
« Reply #9 on: Aug 9th, 2002, 1:07pm » |
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But then how would you display JAN, JUN and AUG? For JAN and JUN you would need to have A and U on the same cube, which makes AUG impossible.
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william wu
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Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
« Reply #10 on: Aug 9th, 2002, 1:38pm » |
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you can move the cubes around to construct different abbreviations. the location of each block doesn't have to stay the same for each abbreviation. so you could have a block with A, and a different block with U
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Paul Hammond
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Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
« Reply #11 on: Aug 9th, 2002, 2:03pm » |
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Doesn't make any difference to Lewis's suggestion. By discarding the M, you reduce the number of symbols required from 19 to 18, but there are only 18 cube-faces available, so you won't be able to duplicate any symbols. To display JAN, the J, A and N must be on different cubes. For JUN, the U must be on different cubes to the J and the N, i.e. it must be on the same cube as the A.
The JAN/JUN/AUG problem proves that it is necessary to duplicate at least one symbol, which means you have at most 17 symbols available to represent the original 19 letters. So it is not sufficient to find one symbol that can represent 2 letters, you need to find 2 such pairs (or perhaps 1 symbol that can represent 3 different letters).
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Jeremiah Smith
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Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
« Reply #13 on: Aug 11th, 2002, 2:52pm » |
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on Aug 9th, 2002, 12:45pm, Lewis Jones wrote:| Only one (capital) letter needs to be rotated. Discard the letter M. When that letter is required, rotate the letter E 90 degrees clockwise. It has been suggested that this "wouldn't work." Why not? No three-letter abbreviation calls for both an E and an M. |
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Well, in theory, but in actual practice you will quickly discover that
A) You need to duplicate a letter.
B) Having E and M on the same side won't work.
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| « Last Edit: Aug 11th, 2002, 2:53pm by Jeremiah Smith » |
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Rolf Wilson
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I used lower case letters with n/u and d/p and found 3 different solutions.
(There may be more - I didn't write a program to test possibilities)
cube 1: d f g j m o
cube 2: a e l n t v
cube 3: b c n r s y
cube 1: d f g j m o
cube 2: a b c l n s
cube 3: e n r t v y
cube 1: e g j o r y
cube 2: a c f l n s
cube 3: b d m n t v
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NoJoy
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Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
« Reply #15 on: Aug 16th, 2002, 11:53am » |
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I used lower case letters with c/n/u and d/p and found
a solution which leaves one cube face open for a photo
of the corporate businessman's wife and kids.
cube 1: f d g j m o
cube 2: a e t u v (photo goes here)
cube 3: b c l r s y
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Jeremiah Smith
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Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
« Reply #16 on: Aug 16th, 2002, 10:38pm » |
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on Aug 16th, 2002, 11:53am, NoJoy wrote:I used lower case letters with c/n/u and d/p and found
a solution which leaves one cube face open for a photo
of the corporate businessman's wife and kids.
cube 1: f d g j m o
cube 2: a e t u v (photo goes here)
cube 3: b c l r s y
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Oooo. Spiffy. I was wondering if there was a way to use c/n/u and save a face, but I decided not to bother.
Theoretically, I wonder how many letter sets you could make. I mean, a and e look similar if you flip them upside down (provided you use the right font for the a), maybe you can stick them on the same side and stick two photos on that cube.
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Allison
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Hmmm... I came up with a different solution. Now that I've read the "solution", I can't believe mine works too! I used the "C/U" flip as well to get the number of letters down to 18, but as noted you need to use "A" twice. So the other letter I doubled up on was "T/Y". If you use a stylized T where the top bar is slanted instead of perpendicular, it can be rotated to create the Y. So the cubes are as follows:
Cube1: F D A J O S
Cube2: P B M V A U
Cube3: E L R G N T
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Gray
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My solution uses 4 different letter 'couples', and it's all-uppercase as well, except the N=U case. Check it out:
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titan
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Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
« Reply #19 on: Oct 14th, 2013, 11:35am » |
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1. Cubes can interchange their positions, so, when I need to have M as my dice1, I'll flip dice1 and dice2.
2. U=C=n, T=Y, L=V, a=D, p=b, m=E ('=' implies conversion possible by rotation)
Dice1: F,a,J,S,O,N
Dice2: A, E, p, U, O, anything
Dice3: b,R,Y,n,L,G
Is this what is asked in the ques.? Or do we want to find a separate solution for small n capital letters?
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titan
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Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
« Reply #20 on: Oct 14th, 2013, 11:37am » |
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My above solution doesn't seem to match any of the proposed solutions mentioned in this thread. So, is it correct?
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Grimbal
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Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
« Reply #21 on: Oct 15th, 2013, 1:45am » |
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I think Y=T and L=V wouldn't look right in any font.
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