Boringest Flash Game EVAR

[MikeTwain]

Petals around the Rose. (http://crux.baker.edu/cdavis09/roses.html)


"The answer is always even."


EDIT:

If you're just seeing this thread now, you should probably be aware that almost the entire rest of this thread is SPOILARS!!!

So don't read further if you don't want hints or the solution.

[Silverlight]

You'll be glad when you figure it out. I hated it until the moment I figured out the secret, and then I wanted to inflict it on other people. :)

I'd really like to know, though, why it is that this popped up in two places in my Web scope today.

Edit: Woo! 1.5 kiloposts!

[tronnc]

Got it right from the first try. Quite stupid, i guess its interesting as a way of seeing people think about the problem.

[DrCrypt]

That took me precisely one second to figure out and I suck at this sort of thing. I didn't even play it long enough for it to bore me.

[Jason McMaster]

took me 15-30 minutes. I have a weird way of thinking about things. Cool game though.

[russellmz00]

i don't care what the prof says, i feel stupid for taking so long, especially since i was halfway to the solution right at the beginning.

[TriggerHappy]

Hate this game. Spent the last 15 minutes trying to figure it out, I'm completely stumped. :p

[TriggerHappy]

Just got it, nevermind.

:lol:

[Jason McMaster]

Hey, at least we figured it out quicker than Bill Gates:

http://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-bg.htm

[MikeTwain]

I'd really like to know, though, why it is that this popped up in two places in my Web scope today.

You must read NationalReview.com like me!!!

:D


SLIGHT SPOILERS!!! (highlight)
The name of the game is very important.

BIGGER SPOILERS!!!
I really really do not see this as a "math" puzzle. I started by adding and subtracting the dice...

EVEN BIGGER SPOILERS!!!!!
Don't try to add or subtract "the dice" per se. It's only mathematical in a very simplistic sense.

FINAL HUGE SPOILER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Actually I just refuse to tell you. The Mystic Order of the Petals of the Rose forbids it.

[Silverlight]

You must read NationalReview.com like me!!!

:D

Actually, yes. I'm surprised the timewaster-post meme has spread even to the ostensible editor. :)

Trick for the future. You can be an obsessive-compulsive nutcase like me and try to perfectly match the exact blue that your post is going to be backgrounded in, since they alternate - or you can just stick the spoiler text in quotes, like this:

SLIGHT SPOILERS!!! (highlight)
The name of the game is very important.

BIGGER SPOILERS!!!
I really really do not see this as a "math" puzzle. I started by adding and subtracting the dice...

EVEN BIGGER SPOILERS!!!!!
Don't try to add or subtract "the dice" per se. It's only mathematical in a very simplistic sense.

FINAL HUGE SPOILER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Actually I just refuse to tell you. The Mystic Order of the Petals of the Rose forbids it.
I, too, refuse to tell. The entire enjoyment of the game and its importance comes from the question of whether and how you figure it out; once you know the answer, there's literally nothing left except to inflict it on other people so you can watch them squirm. :)

[Squirrel Killer]

It had taken Dr. Duke well over a year himself, and he would always explain that the smarter you were, the longer it took to figure it out.

I'm a goddamn moron then, because after two tries getting it wrong, I read the background, and it came to me, 2-3 more tries to be sure, and I had it down pat.

[Jason McMaster]

I'd really like to know, though, why it is that this popped up in two places in my Web scope today.

You must read NationalReview.com like me!!!

:D


SLIGHT SPOILERS!!! (highlight)
The name of the game is very important.

BIGGER SPOILERS!!!
I really really do not see this as a "math" puzzle. I started by adding and subtracting the dice...

EVEN BIGGER SPOILERS!!!!!
Don't try to add or subtract "the dice" per se. It's only mathematical in a very simplistic sense.

FINAL HUGE SPOILER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Actually I just refuse to tell you. The Mystic Order of the Petals of the Rose forbids it.

I kept trying to do the EVEN BIGGER SPOILERS part.

[Post-It]

Fine.

MAJOR HUGE FUCKING SPOILER:













I guess I'm the only person in the world who knows that the 'rose' is the center pip in a die? This has been going around the web the past few days and I had never heard of this game before in my life but I knew what the rose was so I got it right on the first time. I kept wondering why everyone was having such a hard time figuring it out til I realized it's apparently not common knowledge what the center pip on a die is called.

Happy?
________
Buy Vaporizers (http://www.vaporshop.com/)

[MikeTwain]

Trick for the future. You can be an obsessive-compulsive nutcase like me and try to perfectly match the exact blue that your post is going to be backgrounded in,

Holy crap that's annoying.

My color turned out to be approximately DEE3E7, but to be honest I didn't even realize you could specify exact colors.

[DrCrypt]

SPOILERS (highlight to read)

I don't think knowing that the middle pip on a die is called a "rose" is necessary. I sure as hell didn't know it and, honestly, the first answer I gave was correct. My train of thought was pretty simple...

The question expect an answer from the results of the dice, so my first question was: how do roses and petals correlate to dice? They don't, so it's an analogy. How does the analogy work, then? Petals surround the center of a rose. On a dice, some pips surround one center pip. So all I did was look at the dice with a center pip and count the pips surrounding it. Bingo.

Edit: I usually wouldn't edit this, but I don't want to ruin the puzzle for people, and I didn't really think through that by referring to Post-It's post I was actually spoiling the puzzle in just the way he did.

[MikeTwain]

This is more spoilers, and the post above by "Post-It" contains spoilers that he should totally surround in a quote block with the color #FAFAFA



I don't even think it's that common to know that the dots on a die are called "pips."

Other than the two Jasons and that MikeTwain guy, we've clearly got a lot of very smart people here. In the non-internet literate world I would guess only about 10% of non-compulsive-gamblers know what a pip is let alone that specific pips have their own names for crying out loud.

[Troy S Goodfellow]

Spoiler I guess:

I guess I'm the only person in the world who knows that the 'rose' is the center pip in a die? This has been going around the web the past few days and I had never heard of this game before in my life but I knew what the rose was so I got it right on the first time. I kept wondering why everyone was having such a hard time figuring it out til I realized it's apparently not common knowledge what the center pip on a die is called.

This is a pretty major spoiler, actually. It gives away the entire thing, IMO.

Troy

[extarbags]

[color=#FAFAFAThe non-hidden part of DrCrypt's post told me instantly what it was, only because of how important the name is supposed to be. I knew what a pip was but I had no idea the center pip was called a rose. I never, ever would have gotten it otherwise. Oy.[/color]

[Silverlight]

At this point we may as well stick a giant

The rest of this thread is spoilers

in here.




















*ahem* Now that that's done....

I don't think knowing that the middle pip on a die is called a "rose" is necessary. I sure as hell didn't know it and, honestly, the first answer I gave was correct. My train of thought was pretty simple...

SPOILERS (highlight to read)

Which is why the talk about "the smarter you are, the longer it takes" is a fallacy. The problem is that people associate "smart" with "math-smart" and a mathematical person is going to start looking for complicated correlations between dice. That was my first instinct - try to look for the pattern. I got frustrated when I couldn't find it. I clicked over to the Bill Gates article, where I got the crucial third clue, which is that the title means something as opposed to being random gibberish that was thrown in for no reason. After that it was easy. I have to admit that I am not impressed with someone who spent a year working on the puzzle before getting the point. The underlying meme here is "Take a potshot at smart people and show them a puzzle they can't solve" and I'm not prepared to call myself "dumb enough" to only take ten minutes, let alone the people who got it instantly.

I agree that knowing the name of the center pip is a total giveaway, although I still needed to poke around at that point to see exactly what constituted a "petal" and what constitued a petalled "rose".

EDIT: I forgot that #FAFAFA is off-white when I wrote this just now....

And what I meant about putting in spoiler quotes was "Stick it in a quote box, and color it white, and it'll be covered, because the quote box is just barely off-white."

[MikeTwain]

Well FAFAFA is pretty fun too.

More SPOILER discussion follows below....NOT HIDDEN!!!







OK


So I completely agree that the idea that "the smarter you are the longer it takes you to get this is" pretty stupid. I think what the guy is trying to claim is that smart people tend to analyze the problem too much and look for mathematical patterns. If you weren't smart you wouldn't really know how to analyze it so you wouldn't waste time with that...you'd look for more obvious things. I still don't agree with even that analysis if that's what he was going for of course.

My basic feeling about these kinds of "puzzles" and all of their relatives like "manhole" based interview questions, impossible conundrums, probability puzzles, etc, is that I've never seen any hard evidence that there is a correlation between intelligence (however you might define it) and ability to solve these puzzles quickly.

I think the word several people have been using--"Inflict"--is probably the most apt way to describe this entire class of exercises. The ONLY thing these puzzles demonstrate is that people really like to lord shit over other people to make them feel dumb.

Hey don't get me wrong, I love doing that too or I wouldn't have posted this, but I don't care whether Bill Gates got this in 1 second, 1 minute, 1 hour, or 1 year. He's obviously very smart and more importantly he's hogging all the damn money...jerk.

[DrCrypt]

That "The smarter you are, the longer it takes you to figure out!" thing is bullshit. I don't care how mathematically minded you are: if you aren't trying to understand the question BEFORE you look for the answer, then you are a piss poor mathematician. I think what it shows is that some people could never, ever understand how a rose could be a dice, and so they immediately dismiss the question as gibberish. Which means they are then trying to answer a question correctly without knowing what that question even is. You have to be pretty stupid to spend a year trying to solve a "problem" when you don't even know what the problem is supposed to be.

[Bill Dungsroman]

Fuck Dr. Duke. I figured it out on my second try, because I wasn't sure how even rolls figured in at first. So, I guess Crypt, tronnc, and I aren't very bright? Whatever. Seems to me the puzzle doesn't test intelligence, just literate vs. creative thinking, or the like.

[nutsak]

I like how the people that got it from the get go are offended by what the Dr said. Maybe he was right in another way.

[extarbags]

Fuck Dr. Duke. I figured it out on my second try, because I wasn't sure how even rolls figured in at first. So, I guess Crypt, tronnc, and I aren't very bright? Whatever. Seems to me the puzzle doesn't test intelligence, just literate vs. creative thinking, or the like.

I'm thinking it's more a test of one's knowledge of gambling colloquialisms.

[DrCrypt]

Fuck Dr. Duke. I figured it out on my second try, because I wasn't sure how even rolls figured in at first. So, I guess Crypt, tronnc, and I aren't very bright?
It's no shock to me that I'm not very bright. But Dr. Duke's assertion raised an interesting question: exactly how very not bright am I? So I raced to my calculator to figure it all out.We know that Doctor Duke has the maximum level of human intelligence possible because it took him over a year to solve and "the longer it takes you, the smarter you are". So I Googled up Marilyn Vos Savant's IQ, which is 196, and gave it to Doctor Duke. Now how stupid am I compared to Doctor Duke? Well, it took Doctor Duke 31,536,000 seconds to solve the puzzle, where as it took me only one. So obviously Doctor Duke is thirty one million, five hundred and thirty six thousand times smarter than me. This gave me all the data I needed to figure out my actual IQ.

IQ Comparison

Dr. Duke - 196 IQ
Dr. Crypt - 6.21512E-06 IQ

[Wheelkick]

I think it's more a test of one's temper... Some of you seems to have failed ;)

[MikeTwain]

This whole "since it took me a year and I'm smart therefore the longer it takes you the smarter you are" thing reminds me of a Jim Gaffigan bit about the male seahorse. (Approximated here)

Jim Gaffigan: Did you know the male seahorse has the babies? I bet this is how that happened:

Scientist #1: There's the male seahorse over there

Scientist #2: That one just had a baby

Scientist #1: Yeah well the male seahorse has the baby.



Scientists and Mathematicians are hardly immune from believing whatever makes them look good.

[Raife]

Heh, I got it on the first try as well, and without reading past the first post. I think part of it is whether you want to hammer at it and try to figure out why you are right or wrong, or try to undertand the question before you try to answer it (which I think was also Crypt's point). It took me about three seconds to figure it out.

[Andrew Mayer]

I got it in one. Seemed clear from the description.

[TrodKnee]

I got it in one. Seemed clear from the description.
Actually, it's a little too clear from the description...this Flash version of the game clearly breaks the true rules of the game and is a semi-spoiler in itself.

The rules as I initially understood from seeing this on a different site are:

The name of the game is Petals Around the Rose, and that name is significant. Newcomers to the game can be told that much. They can also be told that every answer is zero or an even number. They can also be told the answer for every throw of the dice that are used in the game. And that's all the information they get.
Once you ask the question "How many petals are around the rose" you have practically given the answer away.

[andrew_fm]

Took me like a minute, if it takes longer for smart people then I guess that makes me an idiot :(

[extarbags]

I got it in one. Seemed clear from the description.
Actually, it's a little too clear from the description...this Flash version of the game clearly breaks the true rules of the game and is a semi-spoiler in itself.

The rules as I initially understood from seeing this on a different site are:

The name of the game is Petals Around the Rose, and that name is significant. Newcomers to the game can be told that much. They can also be told that every answer is zero or an even number. They can also be told the answer for every throw of the dice that are used in the game. And that's all the information they get.
Once you ask the question "How many petals are around the rose" you have practically given the answer away.

Again, only if the player happens to know that slang term.

[Bill Dungsroman]

Fuck Dr. Duke. I figured it out on my second try, because I wasn't sure how even rolls figured in at first. So, I guess Crypt, tronnc, and I aren't very bright? Whatever. Seems to me the puzzle doesn't test intelligence, just literate vs. creative thinking, or the like.

I'm thinking it's more a test of one's knowledge of gambling colloquialisms.
Well, I'm born and raised in Las Vegas, and I've never heard the center pip (okay, I have heard the term "pip") called a rose. I think it tests unconventional, perhaps even artistic (after a fashion), thinking. "Right-brained" thinking, I think. Or whichever brain side it is. It reminds me of all those other IQ riddles. WHICH I TOTALLY ACE.

[TrodKnee]

I got it in one. Seemed clear from the description.
Actually, it's a little too clear from the description...this Flash version of the game clearly breaks the true rules of the game and is a semi-spoiler in itself.

The rules as I initially understood from seeing this on a different site are:

The name of the game is Petals Around the Rose, and that name is significant. Newcomers to the game can be told that much. They can also be told that every answer is zero or an even number. They can also be told the answer for every throw of the dice that are used in the game. And that's all the information they get.
Once you ask the question "How many petals are around the rose" you have practically given the answer away.

Again, only if the player happens to know that slang term.
I disagree. When I first tried the game, I figured there was some trick involved and that the name was probably not literal. One of the first things I tried was adding the die scores up like a golf score - Petals Around the Rose. With the original rules, you are told the name of the game is significant, but not how. Once you state the question "How many petals are around the rose?", you make it clear that you are literally counting petals as opposed to using any other kind of complex formula (which is the supposed approach that causes "smart" people to take longer to solve the puzzle). It also becomes clear that there is a literal "rose" to be found, and the "petals" can be found around the rose. That much information defeats the original spirit of the puzzle.

[Bill Dungsroman]

Once you ask the question "How many petals are around the rose" you have practically given the answer away.
What question should you ask, then?

[Silverlight]

Once you ask the question "How many petals are around the rose" you have practically given the answer away.
What question should you ask, then?
I assume that the appropriate wording of the question would be something like "What's the answer?" or something equally vague.

[TrodKnee]

Once you ask the question "How many petals are around the rose" you have practically given the answer away.
What question should you ask, then?

Hey, at least we figured it out quicker than Bill Gates:

http://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-bg.htm
The link Jason posted demonstrates the appropriate presentation of the puzzle.

[Bill Dungsroman]

Okay. It's academic at this point whether just stating the name of the game is "Petals Around the Rose" or actually asking how many of same is significantly more difficult, but I think the people who got it quickly still would have. I mean, although I took the test with the clue provided as a question, I was not given an example solution. That might have even been easier, being told the game was called Petals Around the Rose and given a sample answer.

[MikeSofaer]

I certainly immediately understood that there was counting of outer pips involved as soon as I saw "How many petals are around the rose?" I guess since that's a give away I don't have to accept that I'm an idiot just yet.

[Alan Au]

I'd really like to know, though, why it is that this popped up in two places in my Web scope today.
Yeah, it's weird how memes flow from location to location. I find that far more interesting than the silly dice-related gimmick.

- Alan