Goodbye Old, Hello New!

This will be the last post in The Problem Site News. Why? Because with three puzzle sites (plus a puzzle store), it doesn't make sense to maintain multiple blogs, when a single blog could be used to keep people updated on all the Puzzler Sites.

The new blog is located on The Puzzler Store website, at the following URL: http://www.puzzler-store.com/blog/.

If you have subscribed to this blog, you can subscribe to the new blog by clicking here: The Puzzler Sites Blog Feed.

The Puzzler Store

I was very excited yesterday to realize that Tile Puzzler was almost up to one thousand puzzles. If you don't know, Tile Puzzler is a site filled with shape puzzles, most of which have been submitted by visitors to the site. So, with the site only a few months old (I started building it in November of 2006), it's amazing to me that it has achieved this much popularity.

This morning I looked again and found that the site had reached the One Thousand Puzzle Milestone. In addition, these 1,000 puzzles have been solved a total thirteen thousand, three hundred and seventy four times!

In honor of Tile Puzzler reaching the 1,000 milestone, I'm pleased to announce the launch of a new site in the Puzzler family. The site is The Puzzler Store. This has been a long time coming; for several years I posted links to educational software, and other educational products (books, textbooks, toys, etc) on The Problem Site. Alas, TPS was not really well structured for that; if you visit the Pick Of The Month Page, you will see that the page is a bit cluttered and claustrophobic. The new online store for educational resources has a much more "open" layout, which makes it easier to find what you want.

When you visit The Puzzler Store, you will find that the first page you see contains the "Top Picks". These are educational/puzzle products which have been recommended by various members at Tile Puzzler and Quote Puzzler. In other words, they're puzzle products recommended by puzzle enthusiasts! You just can't get any better than that!

And the great news is, when you go shopping at The Puzzler Store, your shopping cart is processed by Amazon.com, a recognized and reliable company. When you purchase from The Puzzler Store, you are helping to support many wonderful puzzle resources!

From time to time, as you play the games on The Problem Site, Tile Puzzler, and Quote Puzzler, you will see advertisements that look something like this:

These ads show you a sampling of products which are available at The Puzzler Store.

Pentominoes - Big Pentominoes and Small!

Be sure to read all to the end of this post, so you can find out how to win a free month's subscription at Quote Puzzler!

Here are some interesting pieces of trivia about Pentominoes (or Pentominos, depending on how you like to spell it!)

First, in case you didn't know what a Pentomino is, it's a shape made up of five square tiles all touching at least one another tile on a complete side. There are twelve possible Pentomino shapes, not counting rotations and flips. Here they are (taken from Tile Puzzler).



So here's your trivia for the day. Did you know that if you take a checkboard, and cover ANY 2x2 square region on the board, the resulting shape can be completely covered by the 12 Pentomino shapes. No matter where the 2x2 region is covered!

Here's another. Did you know that there is only one way to make a 3x20 rectangle using all the Pentomino shapes?

Okay, and now for the big one...

Take any Pentomino shape, and blow it up to three times its normal size. Now, using nine of the remaining 11 shapes, fill in the BIG Pentomino. Not sure what I mean by that? Well, Okay, I'll show you an example. But wait...before I show you an example, maybe you'd like to try to solve one:

The Big T

Okay? If you want to see the solution to this puzzle, scroll down to the bottom of this post.

Now, one of the nice features about the Tile Puzzler site is that it doesn't just allow you to solve puzzles, it also lets you create them! So I'm throwing down a challenge...can you create a Pento Puzzler that uses nine different shapes, and those nine shapes form a 3x magnified version of one of the tiles you didn't use?

Currently, The Big T is the only one of these puzzles on the site. I'd like to see all twelve of these puzzles on the site, so I challenge you...can you create the others?

If you create one of these puzzles, you can title it "The Big ?", where ? is the letter name of the puzzle piece. If you don't know the names of the puzzle pieces, this should help you out (borrowed from the University of Texas at Austin Math Department website):



Okay? All that's left now is to offer you an incentive. Here it is: if you can successfully create one of the "BIG" puzzles which has not already been added to the site, you will receive one month's free subscription to the Quote Puzzler Daily Word Game Site (Limit one incentive per person!) Note: please first create a free membership account at Tile Puzzler, and be sure you are logged in when you create the puzzle, that way I can verify your identity, and give you your prize!

Which Puzzles Have Been Done?
The Big T
The Big I (created by yoi55)

Which Puzzles Haven't Been Done?
The Big U
The Big V
The Big W
The Big X
The Big Y
The Big Z
The Big F
The Big L
The Big P
The Big N

And finally, here's THE BIG T, which is already on the site!

Word Scramble - Give It A Try!

Here's a fun puzzle to try out. It's a scrambled word. Your job is to rearrange the letters so they spell out a word. The nice part of this puzzle is, once you get two letters next to each other that are supposed to be next to each other, they combine into one single tile. Thus, you put the word together piecemeal until the whole word is complete!

Math Scramble - A New Math Game

There has been a new game added to The Problem Site. This game is called Math Scramble

Math Scramble is a simple (but occasionally quite difficult!) math puzzle, in which the player must place numbers into the blank spaces in an addition or multiplication problem. Tough to explain, but easy to figure out how it works once you see it!

Play Math Scramble!

If you would like to link to this new game from your own website, here's where you can get the linking code to put in your webpage: Link To Math Scramble

Finally, for your further entertainment, here is the latest puzzle added to the Tile Puzzler website. Enjoy!