NUMB3RS, Part 4: CHOCOLATE CALCULATOR by Leigh Lundin I love the little puzzles and games readers send in, more than to be mystified, I like to demystify. Here is the fourth in our series, this time from South Beach, Florida. The best puzzles are like the best mysteries, enigmatic at first, requiring the reader to […]

NUMB3RS, Part 3: MYSTERY GIFT by Leigh Lundin Friends Claire, Judy, and Sharon sent along a magic trick and wondered how it worked. In previous columns (here and here), I revealed the mysteries of a couple of puzzling tricks, so I tackled today’s with interest. Many similar tricks use mathematical properties, but today’s problem uses […]

NUMB3RS, Part 2: LIKE TOTALLY by Leigh Lundin Fido A few months ago, a reader sent me an on-line puzzle and asked how it worked. I did a step-by-step explication of that little mystery at the time. Recently another reader, Wendy, sent in an on-line puzzle. This one, called Fido, has a higher level of […]

NUMB3RS, Part 1: LIKE, DUDE! by Leigh Lundin The factors that first drew me to mysteries were the puzzles, the clues, picking out the salient elements and making sense out of them. Those were the same reasons that drew me into writing operating systems software: A computer is a big, complex puzzle, and I enjoyed […]