Die Agony

Introduction This is the solution for the December 2022’s Jane Street puzzle. Check out the original post on the Jane Street website. The Puzzle A six-sided die, with numbers written on each of its faces, is placed on the 6-by-6 grid above, in the lower-left (yellow) corner. It then makes a sequence of “moves”. Each move consists of tipping the die into an orthogonally adjacent square within the grid. ...

Pent-up Frustration 2

Introduction This is the solution of the November’s Jane Street puzzle. It involves pentagons, patience and a lot of computation. Check out the original post on the Jane Street website. The Puzzle The scope of this puzzle is to find the minimum distance between two pentagons arranged in a polyform. You have seventeen identical unit regular pentagonal tiles on a tabletop. You arrange them all into a single polyform, so each pentagon placed after the first shares a side with an already-placed pentagon, but no two pentagons overlap other than along their boundaries. What is the smallest nonzero distance you can create between two of the pentagons? ...