DrKrettin

It wasn't in the "Chess" section of this forum, it was in the "Brain Teasers and Puzzles" section. You have to look for some way in which you are being tricked or misdirected.

True - but it helps to know that there is a chess section and that the poster knows it as well.

Of course!

 

F6 --> F2.

 

Checkmate.

No - K- A6 or B8

The Almighty made a point of saying "If you stick with MY rules", which led me to believe I could take literally his statement that "2. Pawn can be promoted to any other piece EXCEPT KING after reaching rear rank."

So the white pawn promotes to something black, and it's checkmate. But that is just a stupid interpretation of "any piece".

Edit: I didn't see he had posted. I still think my half-move solution is better.

You can explain Black's next legal move then. Please do. As I read the board, C7→C8 is checkmate.

Of course it isn't. It's not even check.

I've found a solution for mate in HALF a move

The pawn is about to take a piece on A8, which has already been removed from the board. It then becomes a queen - checkmate.

It looks impossible to me. I just can't see how to stop the king moving to B8, no matter what we assume. Even if it's a discovered check if the pawn moves to B6.....

Are you sure it's in 1 move? Whatever white promotes to the king can take it (although it would be checkmate the move after with queen to B6 I think). Any checks on the king can be evaded (for 1 move at least)... What am I missing?

I'm glad you said that. As far as I can see, the king can always move to B8 and not be in check, regardless of the direction the pawn can move in (which I suspect is a key to the problem)

Without having put much thought into it, is the symmetry you have discovered not independent of the base you are working in? So it's the same for octal or hexadecimal, or any base greater than 2.

On a different tack, if I may, the Guardian Word of the Year is

Unpresidented

My spellchecker here needs to be updated, because it is now a word. One meaning is

An instance of someone being “prepared to say what most of us are thinking”, but actually saying things most of us are not thinking

Except, most of us are not thinking the things Trump is thinking. And if we are, it is only in the sense of: “Who in their right mind would think that?”

The Guardian has an article here which gives some other definitions, such as An irrecoverable act of folly committed by a president

Maybe you think the whole puzzle is silly?

 

Are you seriously claiming what the plain meaning of these words say? : "No matter how you place your seeds on the surface of that sphere, the 4 seeds will form the vertices of a regular tetrahedron." ?

 

Suppose they're all planted at the North pole? Or two are planted at each pole? or all are planted along the "equatorial" line-- with one meter between each seed?

*sigh* What I said was in the context of your unnecessarily complicated solution of placing the seeds on the sphere so that they were equidistant from each other. I shall now take the trouble to expand what I said so that even you might understand:

No matter how you place your seeds on the surface of that sphere such that they are all equidistant from each other, the 4 seeds will form the vertices of a regular tetrahedron.

Happy now?

This is arguing a silly point to death. No matter how you place your seeds on the surface of that sphere, the 4 seeds will form the vertices of a regular tetrahedron. What else are you arguing about? You are using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

Yes, too many variables. But if the rooms are adjacent and the the internal walls have no insulation value compared to the external walls, floors and ceilings of the apartment/house/castle/septic tank/cave, which is generally the case, I doubt whether it's going to make much difference.

No matter how you describe the process, the four seeds end up at the 4 corners of a regular tetrahedron. You can use the sphere to get there, but the answer has not changed.

What is wrong with the analogy of a hosepipe firing a jet of water at the moon? If the hosepipe were strong enough, any sideways movement would result in the end of the stream of water moving faster than light. Anybody who has ever used a hosepipe will know this is nonsense, the water just forms a curved trajectory.

Way too easy .....

 

Now go wipe your tears, and get on with your life. There will be other elections. Better luck next time.

This is really creepy. The amazing US of A chooses to elect an ignorant narcissist as president, and people think this is fine. Somebody who says he doesn't need intelligence briefings because he is smart. Let's just hope there really will be the opportunity for other elections, with this idiot in charge of nuclear weapons and the policy on global warming.

 

 

Intentionally misleading people should be considered a crime!

Considering that it has to be politicians who legislate to make this a crime, it isn't going to happen. Turkeys don't usually vote for Christmas (Thanksgiving?)

Such as grammar issues in the title?

It would be very difficult to answer the above in fewer than 100,000 words, and I'm too busy today.

I've done a rough calculation. See what you think. Let's draw an n-sided regular polygon where the perimeter is a constant P.

We can divide the area into n symmetrical isoceles triangles where the base is P/n. The half angle at the centre is pi/n so the height h of the triangle is given by tan(pi/n) = P/2n.h.

So the area of each triangle is P/2n. P/(2n.tan pi/n)

So the total area is n times that, equal to P^2/(4n.tan(pi/n))

I'll leave it as an exercise for the student to show that that function increases with n to a limit of (pi.P^2)/4

Logical explanation I am unsure of... I would take a guess and say a circle probably gives the largest area 2within the rope. Something to do with larger internal angles?

 

 

You beat me to it. The greater the number of sides of a polygon, the greater the area (for a fixed perimeter). The circle is the case of an infinite number of sides.

"Diel" refers to a day-night cycle (often 24 hours though days were shorter way back when).

 

The Sabbath appears to be a zeitgeiber ....

So "Diel" is a word you have invented, which is fair enough. As for the Sabbath, you must mean Zeitgeber

Black holes through telescopes? Reading other science literature I always thought that black holes are invisible and it was the effect of the black holes on light and stars round it that could be seen and not the black holes themselves.

The point is that there is a huge amount of indirect evidence for black holes, so there is good reason to suspect that they exist. This evidence puts black holes into a totally different category to "life after death" for which there is absolutely no evidence at all. The distinction is an important one.

The word hundred is derived from the word “hundrath”, which actually means 120 and not 100.

I think it's changed its meaning since Old Norse.

In Old Norse hundrath meant 120, that is the long hundred of six score, and at a later date, when both the six-score hundred and the five-score hundred were in use, the old or long hundred was styled hundrath tolf-roett ... meaning "duodecimal hundred," and the new or short hundred was called hundrath ti-rætt, meaning "decimal hundred."

Where does the name "diel" come from? and

"It also suggests reasons for the great oxygenation event, the evolution of multicellularity, the Cambrian Explosion, and the Sabbath."

I'm intrigued about the Sabbath. Please explain.