Detective John was investigating a murder in China.
It was a difficult case, and John was completely stumped until he noticed a message sent to him by the killer cunningly hidden in a newspaper advertisement selling Car Licence Plates.
Detective John thought about it for a while, and when he had solved the puzzle, immediately arrested the guilty man.
Q1) How did John know the advert was a clue for him?
Q2) Solve the code and tell me who John arrested.
This is the newspaper advert (Car licence plates for sale) that Detective John saw.
I ask Joseph to pick any 5 cards out of a deck with no Jokers.
He can inspect then shuffle the deck before picking any five cards. He picks out 5 cards then hands them to me (Jack can't see any of this). I look at the cards and I pick 1 card out and give it back to Joseph. I then arrange the other four cards in a special way, and give those 4 cards all face down, and in a neat pile, to Jack.
Jack looks at the 4 cards i gave him, and says out loud which card Joseph is holding (suit and number). How?
The solution uses pure logic, not sleight of hand. All Jack needs to know is the order of the cards and what is on their face, nothing more.
At the local model boat club, four friends were talking about their boats.
There were a total of eight boats, two in each colour, red, green, blue and yellow. Each friend owned two boats. No friend had two boats of the same colour.
Alan didn't have a yellow boat. Brian didn't have a red boat but did have a green one. One of the friends had a yellow boat and a blue boat and another friend had a green boat and a blue boat. Charles had a yellow boat. Darren had a blue boat, but didn't have a green one.
Can you work out which friend had which coloured boats?
I have thought of a number that is made up by using all the ten digits just once. Here are a few clues for you to guess my number:
First digits is divisible by 1.
First two digits are divisible by 2.
First three digits are divisible by 3.
First four digits are divisible by 4.
First five digits are divisible by 5.
First six digits are divisible by 6.
First seven digits are divisible by 7.
First eight digits are divisible by 8.
First nine digits are divisible by 9.
The number is divisible by 10.
The day before the 1996 U.S. presidential election, the NYT Crossword contained the clue “Lead story in tomorrow’s newspaper,” the puzzle was built so that both electoral outcomes were correct answers, requiring 7 other clues to have dual responses.
