Puzzle Corner: Kakuro
I do love a good puzzle game. Tetris was a good transition from pure reflex games to something a bit more thoughtful. I loved Sudoku when it came out. I enjoyed using Excel to code up a program to solve them. More recently KenKen has held my attention. When I get to the Arts section of the New York Times  each morning I start to pat my pocket for a pen. It’s quicker to complete than the crossword puzzle, and I don’t have all that arcane knowledge anyhow. I’m not much of a gamer, but I’ve enjoyed a few IOS apps over the years. Games like Move the Box, Sporos, and Color Zen. Then came Kakuro. Kakuro is elegant like Kenken, but on a grander scale.
Kakuro is set on a crossword-style grid, but instead of letters going into the squares, it’s numbers. Each “down” or “across” clue is just a number indicating the sum of the digits. Sound simple? It can get very tricky, and that’s what makes it fun.
 I love learning new things about the numbers. The puzzle only uses the integers from 1-9 but that gets deep. Like Kenken, knowing that to make 7 with 3 unique digits means 1+2+4 is key. But the variable length of Kakuro amuses. Three adding to 24 has to be 7+8+9. And seven adding to 29 means that 7 and 9 are missing. Six adding to 22 must be 1+2+3+4+5+7. I’ve been working with these digits for well over 40 years now, and I’m learning new things all the time. It’s also about recognizing what isn’t possible: for example, if you have four digits adding to 13, and then you learn one digit is 7, 8, or 9. Right away you know it has to be 7, because the remaining three digits are a minimum of 6 (1+2+3).
Enough said! My favorite IOS app for this is Primo Kakuro.
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Game Theory and The Price Is Right
 We’ve previously covered Let’s Make A Deal and the famous Monty Hall Problem, so now we can discuss the classic game show The Price is Right. I do remember staying home sick in elementary school, watching Bob Barker shepherd people through the games. It was so long ago that I knew the first digit in the price of a car was a “4,” because the cars always cost four thousand dollars or so. Now, Slate has published a guide on how to bid on Contestant’s Row, how to play the Big Wheel, how to game the Showcase Showdown, and how to play every single game on TPIR. All this is based on pure game theory. Some situations can be gamed, others can’t. You can see the details on the cheat sheet or read the article about this. |
