Couple of days off
Yeah, I took a couple of days off. Actually, I didn't have much time. I was busy doing other things. Imagine that. Anyway, I said I'd answer those riddles, so I will. Don't read the next paragraph if you still want to figure them out.

Riddle 1: The light switch thing. So how would you know? Patience, my friends, patience. You'd flick on one of the switches, leave it on for a while. Read a book. Take a shower. Whatever. Then come back, turn on one of the other switches. Go upstairs. (Your only allowed trip upstairs in this mysterious location.) Ah! Is the light off? Then it's the switch you left off, the only one. Is it on? Touch the bulb. If it's warm, it's the first switch you turned on and left on. If it's not, then it's the most recent switch you flipped. Yes, yes, use of more than just one of the senses necessary for this riddle. On to the next! Riddle 2: Death sentence, morbid riddle, indeed. You are doomed, eh? Both your papers are the death papers, huh? So what do you do? When you pick a paper, immediately eat it! This is the easiest, quickest, and most effective way of immediately removing one of the papers. So since they can't check which paper you chose, they have to check which paper you didn't choose, which is... well, look at that. The DEATH card. So you had to have chosen the LIFE one, right? A life is saved! All right, the final riddle... Riddle 3: You may have heard this one before, in a different environment. But if you didn't... you have two paths, one of certain doom, the other happy and safe. You also have two curious fellows, one who tells the truth always, the other who never, ever does. And you don't know which is which. You're allowed one question, so what do you ask? "Which road would he tell me is the safe one?" Ah! It doesn't matter who answers, you know not to go to the road he points to. There's a single lie in there somewhere. It's binary math, simple! It's an XOR thing. If a lie is 1, when you combine a truth and a lie, you get a lie (0 XOR 1 = 1). Two lies is a truth (1 XOR 1 = 0), two truths are STILL TRUE (0 XOR 0 = 0). XOR is "exclusive or", for those who don't know. And in this case you've got a 1 and a 0. Yeah, so maybe I've got a degree in computer science. It works.

Okay, enough of riddles. What else today? Well, I recently got a friend into an older game that's easily in my top ten games of all time. It's a little thing called ICO, for the PS2. The whole thing is very well put together. The story, the environment, the imagery, all of it. And it's an intelligent game. Requires a bit of puzzle-solving. (Not riddle-solving, mind you.) I highly recommend it. Only bad thing is that you can only go through it for the first time once. But it's a great experience.

And I have no link for today. Nothing overly weird to point to. Yet. But I do have a counter! I got one, it's at the bottom, to show me just how many people love me.
- posted by Pootenheimer @ 10:48 AM | 0 comments