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        riddles >> hard >> CALENDAR CUBES II
        
(Message started by: Hobbes on Jul 31st, 2002, 2:54am)
Title: CALENDAR CUBES II
Post by Hobbes on Jul 31st, 2002, 2:54am
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).
Title: Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
Post by Hobbes on Jul 31st, 2002, 6:11am
Never mind, I found the answer somewhere else. You do need to rotate (2) letters.
Title: Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
Post by jeremiahsmith on Aug 8th, 2002, 5:24pm
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!
Title: Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
Post by Paul Hammond on Aug 8th, 2002, 6:19pm
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.
Title: Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
Post by william wu on Aug 8th, 2002, 6:23pm

on 08/08/02 at 17:24:30, jeremiahsmith wrote:
Curse you, william wu! And your caps lock key!


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! ;D

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 :)
Title: Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
Post by jeremiahsmith on Aug 8th, 2002, 6:24pm
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?"
Title: Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
Post by jeremiahsmith on Aug 8th, 2002, 6:27pm

on 08/08/02 at 18:23:31, 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.

Still, though, the upside-down U is technically n, not N.
Title: Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
Post by william wu on Aug 8th, 2002, 6:38pm

on 08/08/02 at 18:27:51, jeremiahsmith wrote:
Still, though, the upside-down U is technically n, not N.

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.
Title: Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
Post by Lewis Jones on Aug 9th, 2002, 12:45pm
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.
Title: Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
Post by Paul Hammond on Aug 9th, 2002, 1:07pm
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.
Title: Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
Post by william wu on Aug 9th, 2002, 1:38pm
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
Title: Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
Post by Paul Hammond on Aug 9th, 2002, 2:03pm
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).
Title: Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
Post by jeremiahsmith on Aug 11th, 2002, 2:52pm
The solution I found for lowercase letters was this:

http://rec-puzzles.org/new/sol.pl/geometry/calendar
Title: Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
Post by jeremiahsmith on Aug 11th, 2002, 2:52pm

on 08/09/02 at 12:45:56, 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.


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.
Title: Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
Post by Rolf Wilson on Aug 13th, 2002, 3:21pm
 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
Title: Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
Post by NoJoy on Aug 16th, 2002, 11:53am
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
Title: Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
Post by jeremiahsmith on Aug 16th, 2002, 10:38pm

on 08/16/02 at 11:53:44, 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



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.
Title: Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
Post by Allison on Dec 5th, 2002, 12:04pm
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
Title: Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
Post by Gray on Feb 25th, 2003, 10:14am
My solution uses 4 different letter 'couples', and it's all-uppercase as well, except the N=U case. Check it out:

http://www.bridgebuilder-game.com/images/forums/riddle.gif
Title: Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
Post by titan on Oct 14th, 2013, 11:35am
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?
Title: Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
Post by titan on Oct 14th, 2013, 11:37am
My above solution doesn't seem to match any of the proposed solutions mentioned in this thread. So, is it correct?
Title: Re: CALENDAR CUBES II
Post by Grimbal on Oct 15th, 2013, 1:45am
I think Y=T and L=V wouldn't look right in any font.


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