Puzzle Mix – to keep you busy this week

UPDATE: The answers to all the puzzles below have been posted here.

I has organized a daily puzzle contest (for 5 days) sometime back. I had prepared around 4-5 puzzles every day and sent them across by mail. Given below are all the puzzles. Answers in a week’s time.

Let me tell you a thing or two about solving puzzles. It is much easier than you think it is. Maybe, all the big puzzle competitions happen only in the capitals of the various countries, but this doesn’t mean you can’t capitalize on the other opportunities. Actually, the capitalism existing in our country is preventing us from spending more time on solving puzzles. Sometimes, this lack of time to solve puzzles results in lesser innovation in organizations. So, it is time to throw out the bureaucracy and come together to solve all the puzzles. One always wonders whether such techniques do yield results, but believe me, they do. Last, but never the least, we hope that you were able to find the name of the city.

PUZZLE 2: Piled up in Egypt

The boxes are arranged such that the number inside a box is equal to the sum of the numbers of the two boxes supporting it (i.e. the two boxes below it). No number is repeated and all numbers are greater than zero. What is the number in the topmost box?

PUZZLE 3: A puzzle on my table!

After seeing this puzzle kept on the table, even Dr.Watson would have been tempted to say, “It’s elementary, my dear!”

99, 15, 53, 8, 11, 32

PUZZLE 4: STR-ANG-E OR-GANI-SMS

Given below is an empty crossword. You have to fit the following words into the grid. Then the letters in the colored cells will give you the answer.

Words: 282, 2253***, 28669, 78779, 5262

Corfu

Either

Viefi

Nerves

Open

Sexi

Wort

Look at the words above. All of them have something extra. Once you identify the “extra” bit, do the most logical thing and you will get the seven letter answer.

PUZZLE 6: TOUR OF LIMASSOL

Amdocs Social Club has organized a tour of Limassol. You are here, sharp at 8 AM on a nice Saturday morning. As you try to board the bus, the driver asks you for a password. You say to the driver that you were not given any password when you registered in the survey. The driver says that the survey system had crashed on Friday night and the only way they could allow people to get on the bus was through this password system. You try to argue, but to no avail. As you turn back, the driver says “Sorry, my friend. Maybe, you can have a look at some of the photographs taken by your friends during the previous tour”. You grab the paper thinking that the driver was just making fun of you. But, soon you realize otherwise. The paper seems to be a collage of 9 photographs with people gesturing through some strange signs. You immediately start decoding the message and realize that it indeed has the password. Can you find the password from the collage below? You can download a higher resolution picture here. Thanks to Harish and Anith for modeling for this puzzle. Btw, both are right-handed and hence, their right hands take priority over their left.

Do you know the NATO phonetic alphabet? If not, search it up on the net. In the passage below, the NATO phonetic code words of all letters of the alphabet (A to Z) but one have been encoded. Find the one alphabet which has been omitted. To get you started, I shall give an example: Alpha (for letter A) has been encoded as one of the “Two Greeks”.

(Repeat Twice): Tyson and his father (in a radiation outfit) went to a country, a Canadian province and a capital city. There they met Frankenstein, two Greeks, an African, an American and his angels. They danced twice (to critical acclaim), had a drink in the local Mariott, played a sport, watched a play by William and before December they founded a software company, for which they won an award.

PUZZLE 8: PRIME-TIME PUZZLE

All the numbers in the table below can be expressed as a product of some primes. Do the prime factorization for each of them and then look for some pattern to find the 8-letter word!