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[donstobbart]

Just completed. Thanks for suggesting one and a third, I was banging my head against a brick wall until then.

[oliverkeers13]

Sorry, I'm having real difficulty with this one, can someone post a solve?

[josiah]

I think this is it... I've locked out the card for today though (miscalculated mary's age). If someone could let me know if this is correct, I'd be grateful

[Langley Moor]

I can confirm that it is in fact 1 and 1/3.... hopefully that'll help!

[oliverkeers13]

Didn't work for me Josiah

[Tufty]

[josiah]

Yeah, I was pretty rubbish... luckily I photocopied it and handed it out as homework at work, and someone came back a right answer.... but all of that is moot now

Just for completeness sake, the solve is definitely:

[oliverkeers13]

Thank you all so much! That works great!

[en4rab]

Grrr it wouldnt have hurt them to put a space between the 1 and the 1/3, I was using 11/3 no wonder I couldnt get sensible numbers lol
cheers for the help
en4rab

[Adam G.]

hey, im having trouble with this card and theres no where in these posts that gives me a start point exept working out the farms dimentions but could someone push me in the direction of where to start, may thanks Adam.G

[CoolCats712]

[sledgecallier]

Ok, I confess that I am prob being dumb here but how is:

[kniteli]

^^^ the Xs are the black spaces, everything else is the answers.

I made mistake in my math, but i ended writing a program for this code which helped significantly cut down the time taken to run through tedious numbers lol. got all but 3 spots solved and got stuck, finally looked at solution and realized reason i got stuck was cause of sour math, ouch =/ oh well, im happy, i would have gotten there if i didnt make a simple mistake, but would have gotten to it eventually.

[TekkiBreki]

Dell Publishing Company publishes puzzles like this called Figure Logic, and they include detailed solving directions.

Two key things to keep in mind with this type of puzzle are that there are no leading zeroes in the grid and the answer to any given clue might be developed a few digits at a time.

I started breaking this one with 15-across - there are only two two-digit cubes: 27 and 64.

The ones place of 16-across is one less than the ones place of 15-across and must be a 6 or a 3. The ones place of 16-across, however is also the ones place of 7-down, a perfect square. Perfect squares only end in zero, 1, 4, 5, 6 and 9.

This yields a 6 in the ones place of 16-across and establishes 15-across as 27. The speed of Farmer Dunk's 1 - 1/3 perimeter walk is now known and a relation can be developed for the perimeter of the farm. Perimeter P is 66 times a two-digit number whose tens place is a one. The two digit number is 8-down and the known digit is the first digit of 8-across, the first year of ownership of Dog's Mead (1XXX). This gives a set of 10 possible values for the perimeter {660, 726, 792, 858, 924, 990, 1056, 1122, 1188, 1254}. Four of these are inconsequential because they have four digits and 14-across is a three-digit number.

11-across, Mary's birth year, is either 18XX or 19XX. The youngest she could be in 1939 if born in 18XX would be 40 (1899). Her age in 1945 would be 46, and her brother's 92. 10-across, their father's current age, is also a two-digit number, necessarily greater than the brother's age. This construction is very unlikely since there are two other two-digit ages that can be assumed to be greater than the father's age (those of his mother-in-law and aunt). It would be reasonable to assume that Mary was born in 19XX. This gives 9 as the middle digit of a five-digit perfect square and trials with a calculator yield a set of three numbers {114, 134, 176} whose squares are XX9X6.

The fourth digit of XX9X6 (7-down) is the first digit of the perimeter of the farm and further narrows the field of six remaining values for the perimeter.

Repeated passes through the puzzle allow stronger and stronger assertions (numbers with fewer wildcards and sets with fewer members) to be made as information is developed.

[padlocksj]

W. T. Williams and G. H. Savage are Real People who wrote Puzzle Books in the 1940s, "The Peguin Puzzle Books". Would it help solve this cross-number, if we went back and found the orginal puzzle?