Puzzle October 12, 2008
From Scott Weiss of Walkertown, Md.: Name the sixth thing in a well-known series.
Change its third letter to the next letter of the alphabet. Then rearrange all the letters,
and you'll get the seventh thing in the series. What names are these?
Solution?
Well, that was a fun puzzle, and it only took me about ten minutes to solve it without a computer.
Unfortunately, it isn't the kind of puzzle you can solve with a computer, mostly
becuase you can't get lists of well-known series, at least nowhere that I know of.
However, you may get a kick out of seeing the various lists I considered before I
realized the answer referred to the series of planets in our solar system. I considered
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The Seven Dwarves
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Santa's reindeer
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The cities in the song 'Route 66'
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Shakespeare's seven stages of man
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The seven deadly sins
And many more!
One interesting outcome of this puzzle is that it made me think of an AI project I'd read about
in Scientific American a few years ago, the "Cyc" general knowledge base and commonsense reasoning engine. A freeware
version is available at http://opencyc.org/, but
so far the learning curve has been really steep. Perhaps I will use it to solve a puzzle in the
future.
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