How old is your son? asked a man to his neighbour. My son is five times as old as my daughter and my wife is five times as old as my son. I am twice as old as my wife whereas my grandmother, who is celebrating her eighty-first birthday is as old as all of us put together.
These types of puzzles are known as charades. What you have to do is to find two words that are referred to in the first stanza and the second stanza and put them together to form the third word in the third stanza.
Just for example, if my first refers to 'off' and my second refers to 'ice', then my whole will be the 'office'.
My first is present - future's past -
A time in which your lot is cast.
My second is my first of space
Defining people's present place.
My whole describes a lack of site -
A place without length, breadth, or height.
Its something that each of us devours,
Not just us but birds, beats, trees, and flowers,
Frets iron and nibbles steel,
Toil hard stones to meal,
Exterminates king, collapse town,
And blows the mountains down.
Three people enter a room and have a green or blue hat placed on their heads. They cannot see their own hat but can see the other hats.
The colour of each hat is purely random. They could all be green, blue, or any combination of green and blue.
They need to guess their own hat colour by writing it on a piece of paper, or they can write 'pass'.
They cannot communicate with each other in any way once the game starts. But they can have a strategy meeting before the game.
If at least one of them guesses correctly they win $10,000 each, but if anyone guesses incorrectly they all get nothing.
What is the best strategy?
In 2011, people playing Foldit, an online puzzle game about protein folding, resolved the structure of an enzyme that causes an Aids-like disease in monkeys. Researchers had been working on the problem for 13 years. The gamers solved it in three weeks.
