Puzzle Solution!!

Thanks to everyone who tried the first MikeDiDonato.com puzzle! We had a lot of participation.

A few folks have been aching for the answer, so this post will describe the process necessary to find the solution.

Step 1:
Solve the word riddles. Each riddle had a number solution as follows:

16 candles
79 pumpkin disc 19 (smashing pumpkins album 1979)
47 fifteenth prime
99 bottles of beer
59 feelin’ groovy street (song)
8 infinity gets up (the symbol for infinity, righted)
88 Reagan’s last leap year
7 neutral ph
32 the king’s freezing point
21 blackjack
10 hexadecimal A (the number system, like binary)
58 all the states had dinner (fifty ate – ha!)
75 Fischer Forfeits (year, 1975)
13 Lovell’s unlucky number (Apollo 13)
56 heinz minus one
27 Messier’s Dumbell (Messier’s number for the dumbell nebula)
91 piano and a trio (88 keys plus three)
20 dartboard segments
19 Rutherford B. Hayes (was the nineteenth president)
105 SEVEN!! (seven double factorial)
1 Bono’s need in the night (from the song one)
35 Basic film gauge
74 Ken Jenning’s Streak.

SO! now that you have all these numbers it’s time for step 2.

Step 2:
The method for this step is hinted at in the instructions which state:

At the Breakfast Table
To help bring order to your eating, you periodically check the nutrition facts of the food on the table. Sometimes it’s exciting trying to decipher the information. Anyway, what’s for lunch?

The important words are periodically, table, order, and exciting. Basically each of the numbers you came up with in Step 1 can be associated with the atomic number of an element on the periodic table.

Periodic Table of Elements
The Periodic Table of Elements

For example, 16 is ‘S’, 79 is ‘Au’, and so on. By substituting these elements into the boxes on the right of the puzzle, you get various breakfast foods.

step 2

Step 3:
This last step seemed to stump the most people. The trick was figuring out why there were empty boxes and dots within the layout of the breakfast foods. The box layout was hardly random, it was actually a representation of the periodic table itself. Check it out:

Step 3

Now you can use the Total Calorie numbers at the top of the nutrition facts table! If you find the box that corresponds to the atomic numbers given in the total calories, and take the element abbreviations from those boxes you get a new list of letters:

Au N Pa S Ra Ag S*
and
S Es Re Co Al

These letters can be anagrammed into the following phrase:

An Asparagus
Casserole

And that’s what’s for lunch!!! wow!

Congratulations to Shamus and Andrew for figuring it out! They claimed to have spent nearly 20 hours working on the puzzle last week. And they will be receiving some brownies and t-shirts as their prize.

*It should be noted, this last S was actually missing from the total calories list. Despite this error, Shamus and Andrew still figured out the solution. As my own punishment for screwing up an important part of the puzzle, I promise to post a new puzzle soon with another tempting prize. Thanks for playing!

7 thoughts on “Puzzle Solution!!

  • 4/12/2010 at 10:08 am
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    Ahhh it all makes sense now! I feel stupid for not realising why the layout of the boxes was so significant.

    I really enjoyed your puzzle though and look forward to seeing the next one.

    Reply
  • 4/12/2010 at 10:27 am
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    I get that you left out the “S”, but I’m pretty sure there is no “C” in asparagus. Should Ca (20) have been Pa (91)?

    Reply
    • 4/12/2010 at 10:31 am
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      Yes! I’ll have to check to see if I actually screwed it up in the puzzle or if I just copied it down wrong up there.

      Stay tuned.

      Reply
      • 4/12/2010 at 10:32 am
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        Wow! it was actually wrong. Darn it! I’m really sorry I screwed up the end of the puzzle for everybody.

        Extra props for Shamus and Andrew for figuring it out.

        Reply
        • 4/12/2010 at 10:50 am
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          Wait, I double checked and it looks like I was correct with the puzzle and just wrote it wrong here. I’ll make the change.

          Sorry for the confusion!

          Reply
  • 4/12/2010 at 10:32 am
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    Was the “russian town” bit a red herring then?

    Reply
    • 4/12/2010 at 10:34 am
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      Actually no. I forgot to mention that.

      element 105 is actually ‘Db’ not ‘Ha’

      BUT, there was some controversy over the name of the element when it first appeared. Ha was the original element abbreviation, but then they changed the name of the element to Dubnium – naming it after the Russian town where it was found.

      The ixnay on the Russian Town was simply a hint that you should use Ha instead of Db

      Reply

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