mscroggs.co.uk
mscroggs.co.uk

subscribe

Blog

Christmas (2016) is over

 2016-12-28 
More than ten correct solutions to this year's Advent calendar puzzle competition were submitted on Christmas Day, so the competition is now over. (Although you can still submit your answers to get me to check them.) Thank-you to everyone who took part in the puzzle, I've had a lot of fun watching your progress and talking to you on Twitter, Reddit, etc. You can find all the puzzles and answers (from 1 January) here.
The (very) approximate locations of all the entries I have received so far are shown on this map:
This year's winners have been randomly selected from the 29 correct entries on Christmas Day. They are:
1Jack Jiang
2Steve Paget
3Joe Gage
4Tony Mann
5Stephen Cappella
6Cheng Wai Koo
7Demi Xin
8Lyra
9David Fox
10Bob Dinnage
Your prizes will be on their way in early January.
Now that the competition has ended, I can give away a secret. Last year, Neal suggested that it would be fun if a binary picture was hidden in the answers. So this year I hid one. If you write all the answers in binary, with each answer below the previous and colour in the 1s black, you will see this:
I also had a lot of fun this year making up the names, locations, weapons and motives for the final murder mystery puzzle. In case you missed them these were:
#Murder suspectMotive
1Dr. Uno (uno = Spanish 1)Obeying nameless entity
2Mr. Zwei (zwei = German 2)To worry others
3Ms. Trois (trois = French 3)To help really evil elephant
4Mrs. Quattro (quattro = Italian 4)For old unknown reasons
5Prof. Pum (pum = Welsh 5)For individual violent end
6Miss. Zes (zes = Dutch 6)Stopping idiotic xenophobia
7Lord Seacht (seacht = Irish 7)Suspect espied victim eating newlyweds
8Lady Oito (oito = Portuguese 8)Epic insanity got him today
9Rev. Novem (novem = Latin 9)Nobody in newsroom expected

#LocationWeapon
1Throne roomWrench (1 vowel)
2Network roomRope (2 vowels)
3Beneath reedsRevolver (3 vowels)
4Edge of our gardenLead pipe (4 vowels)
5Fives courtNeighbour's sword (5 vowels)
6On the sixth floorSuper banana bomb (6 vowels)
7Sparse venueAntique candlestick (7 vowels)
8Weightlifting roomA foul tasting poison (8 vowels)
9Mathematics mezzanineRun over with an old Ford Focus (9 vowels)
Finally, well done to Scott, Matthew Schulz, Michael Gustin, Daniel Branscombe, Kei Nishimura-Gasparian, Henry Hung, Mark Fisher, Jon Palin, Thomas Tu, Félix Breton, Matt Hutton, Miguel, Fred Verheul, Martine Vijn Nome, Brennan Dolson, Louis de Mendonca, Roni, Dylan Hendrickson, Martin Harris, Virgile Andreani, Valentin Valciu, and Adia Batic for submitting the correct answer but being too unlucky to win prizes this year. Thank you all for taking part and I'll see you next December for the next competition.
                        
(Click on one of these icons to react to this blog post)

You might also enjoy...

Comments

Comments in green were written by me. Comments in blue were not written by me.
Thanks for the prizes. Fascinating books!
Steve Paget
×1                 Reply
I got my prize in the mail today. I really liked the stories from Gustave Verbeek; I thought that was pretty clever. I really appreciate you being willing to send the prizes internationally.

Thanks for setting this all up; I had a lot of fun solving the puzzles every day (and solving half them again when my cookie for the site somehow got deleted). I'll be sure to participate next time too!
SC
×1                 Reply
Thanks, Matthew! The puzzles were really fun, and piecing the clues was very interesting too!
Jack
×1                 Reply
 Add a Comment 


I will only use your email address to reply to your comment (if a reply is needed).

Allowed HTML tags: <br> <a> <small> <b> <i> <s> <sup> <sub> <u> <spoiler> <ul> <ol> <li> <logo>
To prove you are not a spam bot, please type "rebmun" backwards in the box below (case sensitive):

Archive

Show me a random blog post
 2024 

Feb 2024

Zines, pt. 2

Jan 2024

Christmas (2023) is over
 2023 
▼ show ▼
 2022 
▼ show ▼
 2021 
▼ show ▼
 2020 
▼ show ▼
 2019 
▼ show ▼
 2018 
▼ show ▼
 2017 
▼ show ▼
 2016 
▼ show ▼
 2015 
▼ show ▼
 2014 
▼ show ▼
 2013 
▼ show ▼
 2012 
▼ show ▼

Tags

talking maths in public reuleaux polygons pi plastic ratio graph theory pac-man databet stickers palindromes quadrilaterals exponential growth javascript draughts sobolev spaces books gaussian elimination folding paper propositional calculus determinants dates captain scarlet final fantasy dragon curves newcastle hexapawn royal institution world cup rugby football game of life sorting signorini conditions misleading statistics interpolation live stream european cup hats christmas card dataset stirling numbers crossnumber hyperbolic surfaces tennis noughts and crosses harriss spiral matrix of cofactors edinburgh wave scattering squares accuracy curvature triangles weather station speed pascal's triangle realhats geometry simultaneous equations martin gardner logic nine men's morris geogebra latex ucl asteroids wool weak imposition tmip platonic solids computational complexity dinosaurs numbers matt parker chebyshev matrices statistics arithmetic bodmas inverse matrices sound light approximation people maths electromagnetic field youtube numerical analysis gather town polynomials cambridge frobel craft radio 4 news christmas hannah fry golden spiral logo inline code mathslogicbot the aperiodical games london royal baby cross stitch matrix multiplication correlation flexagons runge's phenomenon logs convergence pi approximation day preconditioning machine learning ternary big internet math-off finite group a gamut of games probability mean trigonometry golden ratio estimation puzzles standard deviation mathsteroids coins rhombicuboctahedron graphs turtles datasaurus dozen fractals gerry anderson video games programming 24 hour maths fonts bempp data visualisation fence posts manchester science festival map projections pythagoras sport matrix of minors chess raspberry pi boundary element methods zines london underground binary phd braiding chalkdust magazine mathsjam game show probability reddit oeis menace go errors python finite element method recursion bubble bobble data folding tube maps anscombe's quartet manchester php pizza cutting guest posts error bars national lottery crochet advent calendar countdown

Archive

Show me a random blog post
▼ show ▼
© Matthew Scroggs 2012–2024