Solve the cross-number puzzle "Dog's Mead" (also known as "Little Pigley Farm"), in which every entry is a...
arithmetic/dogs.mead New, unsolved
New entry, edited from material collected for the archive and not yet in a released version.
Problem
Solve the cross-number puzzle "Dog's Mead" (also known as "Little
Pigley Farm"), in which every entry is a fact about Father Dunk's
family or his field.
The grid will only make sense if viewed in a non-proportional font:
*****************************
*1 * *2 *3 * *****4 *
* * * * * ***** *
*****************************
* *****5 * *****6 * *
* ***** * ***** * *
*****************************
* ***** *****7 * * *
* ***** ***** * * *
*****************************
*****8 * *9 * *********
***** * * * *********
*****************************
*10 * *****11 * *12 *13 *
* * ***** * * * *
*****************************
* *************14 * * *
* ************* * * *
*****************************
*15 * *****16 * ***** *
* * ***** * ***** *
*****************************
Across
1. Area in square yards of Dog's Mead (DM)
5. Age of Martha, Father Dunk's aunt
6. Difference (in yards) between length and breadth of DM
7. Number of roods in DM times 8 down
8. The year the Dunks acquired DM
10. Father Dunk's age
11. Year of Mary's birth
14. Perimeter (in yards) of DM
15. Cube of Father Dunk's walking speed (in mph)
16. 15 Across minus 9 Down
Down
1. Value (in shillings) per rood of DM
2. Square of the age of Father Dunk's mother-in-law
3. Age of Mary, Father Dunk's daughter
4. Value (in pounds) of DM
6. Age of Ted, Father Dunk's son, who will be twice the age of his
sister Mary in 1945
7. Square of the breadth of DM
8. Time (in minutes) it takes Father Dunk to walk around DM times 4/3
9. 10 Down divided by 10 Across
10. See 9 Down
12. Sum of the digits of 10 Down plus 1
13. Number of years DM has been in the Dunk family
(Additional information: the year is 1939, one acre = 4 roods = 4840
square yards, one mile = 1760 yards, one pound = 20 shillings)
-- Matthew Daly <mwdaly@kodak.com>, from _Games for the
Superintelligent_ by Jim Fixx
[ Editor: the first paragraph is the editor's summary. ]
Show solution
No solution was found in the collected postings. [ Editor: sources given in the postings follow. ] This puzzle appeared in _Games_for_the_Superintelligent_, by Jim Fixx. -- Ken Balakrishnan <kbalakri@pantheon.yale.edu> IANAL, but my best guess is that this is a public domain puzzle. Jim Fixx certainly had no idea of who created the puzzle when he printed it, and only gave credit to the person who sent him a (no-doubt dog-eared) copy of it. I must say that, while remarkable from a historical context, it seems to me that Dell's Math Puzzles and Logic Problems magazine routinely puts out story-based Challenger Figure Logic puzzles that are much more aesthetically pleasing and no less difficult than this. Just my opinion, of course. -- Matthew Daly <mwdaly@kodak.com> I remember I've seen it in David Wells: The [...] dictionary of curious and interesting puzzles. -- Jan Kok <jankok@cwi.nl> Ahh. Problem Number 448, The Penguin Book of Curious and Interesting Puzzles, by David Wells. Excerpt: This puzzle is from _The Strand Problems Book_ by W. T. Williams, who composed puzzles for _John O'London's Weekly_, and G. H. Savage, who published in _The Strand Magazine_. The puzzle is called "Little Pigley Farm" and was published in 1935. -- Wei-Hwa Huang <whuang@ugcs.caltech.edu>