Lately I’ve been exchanging riddles / mind puzzles with some coworkers of mine. I’m not really sure how it started, but one ended up on my white board at work and before I knew it everyone wanted to know the answer or had their own riddle to challenge me with. I’ve collected up some of my favorites. If you’re unfamiliar with one and you solve it, feel free to post your proposed solution as a comment.

As far as site updates go, I have some coming, but I’ve had a distracting past couple of weeks. Since January I’ve been suffering from tinnitus (ringing in the ears), but it didn’t really get bothersome until the middle of last month. I ended up going on a huge research quest for a cure, but it appears there are only things you can take to prevent tinnitus (NAC, antioxidants) and nothing that’ll really cure it. Right now it’s at a volume I can deal with, so I’m fine, but I want to caution everyone and let you know its important to take care of your hearing. Also, avoid things that are too good to be true. There seems to be a lot of snake oil out there when it comes to tinnitus.

Anyway, enough of my personal problems, on with the riddles…

1) In front of you there are ten boxes of books and a digital scale large enough and strong enough to hold all of the boxes when they’re filled with books. Inside of each box is ten books. In nine of the boxes, the books weigh 1.0 pounds each. In one of the boxes the books weigh 0.9 pounds each. Using the digital scale only once, how do you determine the box that contains the books that weigh 0.9 pounds? You may take the books out of the boxes and you can assume the weight of each box is 1 pound.

2) You’re one an island and you want to get off of it. There are two caves off the island. One leads to certain doom while the other leads off the island. In front of the caves there are two guards. One always tells the truth and the other always lies. You do not know which one is which. You may ask one question which they both will answer. What question can you ask that will guarantee you pick the right cave to get off of the island? [Editors Note: After much discussion, we discovered there were actually multiple answers to this question, so if you know the answer, try to come up with another one]

3) Four men are standing in a row. They are ordered tallest to shortest. The tallest man is facing west while the other three men are facing east. Each man is wearing a hat that is either black or white. Each man knows that there are 2 black hats and 2 white hats, however, they do not know the color of the hat that they are wearing. The tallest man cannot see anyone’s hat, the next tallest man can see the hat color of the two men in front of him, the next tallest man can see the hat color of the man in front of him, and the shortest man can see no one’s hat color. Imagine that the hat ordering from tallest to shortest is: black, white, black, white. Where the tallest person is wearing a black hat and the shortest person is wearing a white hat.

None of these men can move around, however, they can talk to each other – though they do not have to be truthful when answering each other’s questions. As soon as a man figures out his hat color he screams it out (and he cannot scream unless he really knows his hat color). Which man can figure out his hat color and why? [Editors Note: This one is easier if you draw it]

4) You have 25 runners. When raced, they always perform the same, and no two runners perform identically. You can only race 5 at a time, and once a race is over, the only information you get is the order that they finished in. How do you determine the fastest, second fastest, and third fastest runner using only seven races?

5) This was the puzzle that started it all. No one I’ve told it to has been able to figure it out. And it always takes a while for the answer to make sense.

I’m a little prone to conspiousy theories, so I might be jumping the gun here, and I may end up looking totally silly, but I think Yahoo deleted my Color Fader from of their index after I reported some spam in their search results.

A little background: For some reason most of the pages on this site don’t rank well in Yahoo. For the month of May, only 1.87% of my visitors came from Yahoo. That’s compared to 46.37% that came from Google. The Color Fader was the only page that really pulled in visitors from Yahoo. It used to rank #1 for the search phrases “Color Fader” and “Online Color Fader”. Those phrases only brought in around 20 visitors a day, but that’s better than nothing.

Anyway, seeing as these are the only phrases that bring me anything from Yahoo, I check them out every once in a while to see where I am. Around 3 weeks ago I noticed a new site was #1 for them (not unusual – the results tend to get shaken up every so often). However, this new site had the exact same title as my site, so I was a little curious. I opened it up and discovered the page was just auto-generated gibberish with lots of ads.

I was annoyed, but figured I’d just report the site to Yahoo’s Customer Care. In my note I said something like “I was searching for my site when I discovered one that had the exact same title. This site turned out to be auto-generated spam with lots of ads.” I’m not sure why I mentioned I was searching for my own site, I guess I was just typing off the top of my head.

After I submitted my report, I got an email confirmation saying it’d be processed within 48 hours. I checked back twice within that time period. The first time both sites were there, although mine had recaptured the #1 spot. The second time I checked back, both sites were gone.

At first I thought they’d just done some reindexing and I’d fallen a bit. However, after some pretty thorough searching, I found that my app, along with that spam page, was gone from their index. I quickly filled out a resubmit form explaining what I thought had happened – that the reviewer had accidentally deleted my site. I read my message over a couple of times to make sure it was short and polite and then sent it off. A day or so later I got back this reply:

Hello Patrick,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Search.

If you are not seeing your pages in the Yahoo! Search results, they may
not have been indexed or they may not be in the top results for the
searches that you are conducting. Here are some Yahoo! Help resources
for submitting your page to Yahoo! Search:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/indexing/indexing-06.html

and for improving your site’s ranking:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/ranking/ranking-02.html

in the Yahoo! Search results. There are no current indications that your
pages have been blocked from the Yahoo! index. Please note that all
pages are at all times subject to Yahoo!’s Content Quality Guidelines
located at:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/basics/basics-18.html

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Search.

Regards,

Carmen

So according to that email I wasn’t blocked, which was good. However, something still didn’t seem right to me. It seemed like too much of a coincidence that my app and the spam page would disappear from the index at the same time. So I decided to check out Yahoo’s Site Explorer to see what it had on my Color Fader. This is what I found (note: searching with the “www” brings up additional links):

So for some odd reason only the style sheet for the Color Fader is in the index, and not the Color Fader page itself. Even though the links it has recorded for the Color Fader URL point to the app itself and not its style sheet. That seems really bizarre to me. My gut feeling tells me that the page was removed and didn’t drop from the index due to algorithmic reasons. I’m guessing it was either removed by accident, the person processing the spam report just glanced at the URLs and decided to remove them both, or the guy processing the request just didn’t like the fact that I was searching for my own site and decided to knock me off too. The last idea is a little cynical, but my mind tends to wonder all over the place when stuff like this happens. I suppose it could also be a quality issue, but I’d be surprised if that was the case since I don’t think I did anything particularly egregious in my design.

I probably shouldn’t care too much, the Color Fader is kind of girly app, but it annoys me when I try to do something good and then ended up getting punished. As thing are right now, I wouldn’t recommend reporting spam pages to Yahoo, since they might remove your content along with the spam.

It’s been over two weeks since I sent them my last email. I may try to resubmit the site again later today, however, if I say blocked, I stay blocked. It’s annoying, especially since I was beginning to like Yahoo, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.