Let N equal the number of words blacked out in this Recursive Puzzle.

N people before you have seen and successfully solved the Recursive Puzzle. After each person solved it, another word was blacked out. Can you solve it too?

Four wires connect to four plugs. I can't just give it away by saying, "The cyan wire goes here and the blue wire goes there," but I can tell you which plugs and which wires do not match.

The second plug does not go with the ███ wire, the third plug not with the teal wire, and the fourth plug not with the ███. The aqua wire does not go with the third plug, the teal wire not with the fourth plug, and the cyan wire not with the ███.

Solve this puzzle by matching all the colors and numbers. After you've solved it, can you pick another color or number to black out so the next person may solve it?

The Cyan wire goes into the first plug
The Teal wire goes into the second plug
The Blue wire goes into the third plug
The Aqua wire goes into the fourth plug

To solve, consider every possible combination of values the blanks can take. Attempt to solve the puzzle. There are only six different ways the puzzle is solvable. These are if the blanks were as follows:

Cyan/Cyan/Third
Teal/Cyan/Third
Teal/Aqua/Third
Aqua/Aqua/Third
Teal/Aqua/Fourth
Aqua/Aqua/Fourth

Given the above list, we know the person before us solved the puzzle. The only way he could distinguish between the above six combinations is if he was given the value of the first blank, and the value of it was Cyan. Therefore we know the blanks must have originally been Cyan/Cyan/Third originally.  This gives the solution above.

To determine the best word to blank out for the next person, we'd probably have to look at each word in the puzzle as though we were trying to solve it blanked and then perform the same sort of analysis. Which is a lot more work than the above solution required!

Posted by Avin on 2006-08-23 16:35:32