Category Archives: Puzzles

More Hanayama (Chess Piece Puzzles)

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I wrote about Hanayama puzzles before, so this is more a reminder than a long post. After I discovered these fantastic puzzles last year it pretty much became a norm now that anytime I visit Japan and have an occasion to visit Loft department store, of other similar shops selling variety and fun stuff I do so with a hope I will find some new sets. This is how I came across a relatively new set from Hanayama called Chess Puzzles (which apparently is a remake of a puzzle set made by the designer Marcel Gillen) and thought it will be a good moment to mention the company and their products again.

 

Here are my new babies:

hanayama

The Chess Puzzles turned out to be really easy and I went through them in no time. Luckily, there are still quite a few cast puzzles I have not cracked from the large collection I acquired last year.

Hanayama puzzles are of fantastic quality, have a great playability factor, and are a perfect gift for anyone who likes to crack problems.

I (again) highly recommend it.

Cryptarithms (sort of DFIR-related ;))

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Last year I was looking at my very old programs and I came across a cryptarithm solver that I wrote in khem… Pascal. I wrote it to solve one such riddle published in a crossword magazine back in a day (as a side note: when I found it I was actually looking for something completely different in a first place /as it is usually the case/).

As per wikipedia: cryptarithm or word addition, is a type of mathematical game consisting of a mathematical equation among unknown numbers, whose digits are represented by letters. The goal is to identify the value of each letter.

Since I came across it I started wondering if there was a generic solution for this type of puzzle and after googling around I found out that it is possible – some people created dedicated web sites that handle all the solving work for you.

Using these available tools I created these 2 below so if you are bored, you can try to solve them 😉 [as you can see it is DFIR-related 😉 ]

  • RCE+DFIR=ELEET
         RCE
      + DFIR
       ----- 
     = ELEET
  • MFT+FILE+FILE+FILE+FILE=NTFS
          MFT
       + FILE
       + FILE
       + FILE
       + FILE
       ------
       = NTFS

And if you struggle you can always cheat and use this solver by Naoyuki Tamura (that’s how I created these anyway 🙂 )