A businessman has two cubes on his desk. Each cube has a number on each of its sides. Every day, the businessman arranges the cubes in such a way that the upward facing numbers display the day's date. (Note that both cubes are always used for this, so on the 7th of the month, the cubes' surfaces display "07".)

How are these cubes numbered? (I.E. What numbers are on which cube? - call them C₁ and C₂.)

(From http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/riddles/intro.shtml)

(In reply to Huh? by TomM)

Hehe... I was trying to be too clever for my own good, and ended up not being clever enough.

For some reason, I convinced myself that the number 3 also had to appear on both the cubes. In this case, merging 6 and 9 would not have been sufficient. One would need to eliminate one more digit. This is possible with "digital display" style numbers: an upside down "2" becomes a "5".

The hint was that this is the kind of digits that you should be considering (the cubes both show a 3 simply because I drew one of them, and then copy-pasted the other. having them say "1" would not have been clear enough, and I didn't want them to show a "2" since that would have been too much of a hint.

I guess it all comes to nothing... Maybe I should remove it so as not to confuse people.

Posted by levik on 2002-09-10 04:52:21