Physics 3333 / CFB 3333 Homework 3

Inductive reasoning in the sciences is very much like solving puzzles and looking for patterns based on limited information.

Example: Four men, three alive and one dead, are in a room surrounded by fifty-three bicycles. What happened?

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Example: A black cat sits on the hood of a black car under a broken street light during a new moon, but the cat is perfectly visible. Why?

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1. A person was born in 1983 and died in 2003 at the age of 27. How can this be?
2. A man and his son are driving down the road. They get into a crash. Two ambulances come. They take the man and his son to different hospitals. The son goes into the operating room. The doctor looks at him and says, "I can't operate on this boy." The nurse asks, "But, doctor, why not?" The doctor says, "Because he's my son." How is this possible?
3. An ordinary American citizen, with no passport, walks to and sets foot in over thirty foreign countries in one day. He is welcomed in each country, and leaves each one of his own accord. Who is he?
4. A woman walks one mile due south, then one mile due east, then one mile due north. After this three mile trip, she is back where she started. How can this be?
5. What comes next in this sequence and why?
   f,s,t,f,f,s,s,e,n,t,_____
6. This is a substitution cipher in which one letter stands for another throughout. For example, all the X's might stand for Z's. Your task is to decipher the following:
   Nqmilih pt zjoi cm hiza cqpt fmaia sittzdi npoo ghmjzjou nmbaih nqu cqi oztc nmha pb cqpt tibcibfi pt sptgiooia.
   (Hint: etaoin shrdlu)
7. What is the secret message in this block of text?

1. A woman returns home from work, turns on the lights in her apartment, looks at her dead husband, sets the dining table for two, sits down to read the mail, and waits for her husband to come home from work. What is going on?
2. My friend Bob went back to his hometown for Thanksgiving last year and while he was at his parents house sleeping on the couch in his underwear, an old high school friend stopped by to visit.

   "Hey Bob, good to see you. Boy I bet it's been almost twenty years."

   "You look great,"Bob said. "Tell me what have you been doing? I hear you've been running your father's gas station?"

   "Yeah, but more important than that, I'm married. In fact, I married someone who was a year behind us in high school and I'm pretty sure you didn't know. By the way, this is my daughter," the friend said.

   Bob looked down at the little girl who was five or six years old and extended his hand and asked the little girl her name.

   "My mother and I have the same name," she said.

   "Oh that's nice," said Bob. "Then I guess your name must be Annie."

   How did he know?

3. While driving alone out of Dallas to Chicago, a woman notices that many but not all of the cars on the road in front of her are pulling over to the shoulder. None of the cars behind her are doing this. She has not heard any sirens or seen any flashing lights or hearses. The weather is clear. There are no obstructions in the road. Nothing looks out of the ordinary. The people who pull over do not get out of their cars. The cars seem operable. What are they doing?
4. A man receives an unsigned letter telling him to go to the local graveyard at midnight. He does not generally pay attention to such things, but complies out of curiosity. It is a deathly still night, lighted by a thin crescent moon. The man stations himself in front of his family's ancestral crypt. The man is about to leave when he hears scraping footsteps. He yells out, but no one answers. The next morning, the caretaker finds the man dead in front of the crypt, a hideous grin on his face. Did the dead man vote for Teddy Roosevelt in the 1904 U.S. presidential election? Explain.
5. A woman and her husband hosted a party for four other couples. The hostess asked everyone to shake hands and introduce themselves to each other. Of course, no one shook hands with his or her own spouse. At some point, the hostess stopped them and asked each person how many hands he or she had shaken. Each person gave a different response. What was the response of her husband?
6. See if you can figure out the code using only these data.
   
   752750175 = ||...|.|.|...|.||...|.|.|.||......|||...|.|.|....|||
   
   168026300 = |...||.||..|..|.||.....|.|.||....||.||...||....|..||
   
   856217314 = ||..|..|.|..||....|.|...|||...|..||....||.|..|..||.|
   
   What is the pattern? What are the rules? Explain how you learned this.
   
   What is the code for each digit, especially 9 which does not appear in the data set?
   
   
7. Imagine that you are a scientist on the distant planet Fr$#7Hy and you received this message from outer space. What does each part mean?
8. Solve this Sudoku puzzle and print the solution.
9. Solve this puzzle and print the solution.
10. Play this game. What is the purpose? What happens on the last level? If you like this kind of game, here are more.

Hand in the assignment on paper, send it to pseudo@physics.smu.edu, or turn in a disk or CD.