In the spirit of Gomoku, two people play a version of the classic paper-and-pencil game tic-tac-toe but on an infinite checkerboard. In it, a player wins by getting four…
Dennis Shasha
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In this cooperative game, two players want to meet each other in a graph as quickly as possible.
A group of people is sitting around your dinner table with one empty chair. Each person has a name that begins with a different letter: A, B, C . . . Because you love…
Upstart Puzzles: Sleep No More
We begin simply, with a 60-minute clock that counts only minutes, from 0 to 59. The alarm can also be set from 0 to 59 and will go off when the clock reaches the same…
Imagine a 500-square-by-500-square red/black ice checkerboard with walls along all four edges.
Upstart Puzzles: Auction Triplets
There are objects of four types and n people, each with a budget of $99. The objective of each one is to acquire three objects of the same type (any type) before anyone…
You are given two bags, each containing some number NumPerBag of flares. You know there are NumBad flares in one of the bags but not which bag. The other bag has all good…
Upstart Puzzles: Strategic Friendship
Consider the following game (first posed to my close friend Dr. Ecco) played among several entities. Each entity Ei has a certain force Fi and a certain wealth Wi.
Upstart Puzzles: Take Your Seats
A popular logic game involves figuring out an arrangement of people sitting around a circular table based on hints about, say, their relationships. Here, we aim to…
Upstart Puzzles: Proving Without Teaching/Teaching Without Proving
Peter Winkler's mathematically elegant, often whimsical puzzles have been a joy to read and wrestle with. My columns now embark on a different path. Each will come in…
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