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Category: One Hundred Factorial

One Hundred Factorial – the puzzle and the event

The weekly puzzle session that I run at the University of Adelaide is called One Hundred Factorial. In the middle of the night, I suddenly realised that I have never written about why it is called One Hundred Factorial, and so here is the story.
The very beginning
Once upon a time I was a PhD student in […]

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Digit Disguises

This blog post is about a game I invented this week, and the game is AWESOME, if I do say myself.
DIGIT DISGUISES: A game of algebraic deduction
Players:

This game is designed for two players, or two teams.

Setting up:

Each player/team has two grids with the letters A to J, one labelled MINE and one labelled THEIRS, like the […]

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Team SET

While I am thinking about SET, it is high time I wrote about a version of the game SET that was invented at One Hundred Factorial back in 2017, but has never been recorded anywhere for posterity. It is prosaically named Team SET.
In case you don’t yet know, the game SET is a game of visual […]

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Teaching people to play SET on the fly

Amie Albrecht recently posted a most wonderful blog post about SET, and it reminded me there were some SET-related things I should post too.
The first is this little reflection on how I go about teaching people to play SET. Amie talks here about a very excellent way to do this, which is to get people […]

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The second part of the Four Fours

The Back Story
The four fours is a rather famous little puzzle which goes something like this:
Using exactly four of the number 4 each time, write calculations using +, -, *, / that produce each of the natural numbers from 0 to 20.
It’s a classic puzzle that requires some creativity and also gets people thinking about […]

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The Seven Sticks and what mathematics is

This week I provided games and puzzles at a welcome lunch for new students in the Mathematical Sciences degree programs. I had big logic puzzles and maths toys and also a list of some of my eight most favourite puzzles on tables with paper tablecloths to write on.
One of the puzzles is the Seven Sticks […]

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The Number Dress-Up Party

I created the Number Dress-Up Party puzzle way back in 2017 and every so often I stumble across it again when searching Twitter for other stuff. When I stumbled across it today, I decided it was time to write it up in a blog post.
The puzzle goes like this:
The Number Dress-Up Party
All the numbers have […]

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Numbers and Letters

Since 2013, the MLC and Writing Centre have been doing a game called Letters and Numbers at Orientation Weeks and Open Days to create interaction with people. I tweeted a photo of one of our sessions during Open Day yesterday and it has attracted a lot of attention, so I thought I might record some […]

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Fairy Bread

Fairy bread, in case you don’t know, is an Australian children’s party food.

Here’s how to make fairy bread: take white bread, spread it with margarine, and sprinkle with hundreds and thousands. Now cut into triangles and serve.
Notes:

It has to be white bread. If you try to make fairy bread with wholemeal bread, or multigrain bread, […]

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Home in One Piece: a game of strategy using play dough

This post is about a game I invented called Home in One Piece. I invented it in 2014 specifically to play outside at student barbecues, after years of trying to think of an effective game using play dough. I’ve taken the physical version with me to various places to play it, including to Twitter Math […]

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