112
votes
109
votes
Accepted
71
votes
3:3! It's a football score!
Since the puzzle oddly and specifically mentions the symbol for the square root, I used this:
but rotated and reflected it giving:
- 16k
67
votes
59
votes
40
votes
38
votes
Accepted
36
votes
Infinitely long loaf of Bread
You are a physicist (or at least, you have heard a few physicists chatting at the water cooler).
Mike, your friend, is very obliging. Not obliging enough to chop off both ends of a loaf for you, but ...
- 7,909
35
votes
3:3! It's a football score!
How would you get 20, using two threes?
Any out of the box, non-mathematical solutions are accepted.
How about an
“in the box” solution?
You'd be lucky to not get 20, ...
- 21.8k
34
votes
Accepted
Riddles/puzzles having answer hidden in the question?
I'll confess that I've always had a fondness for the Jester's riddle from Zork Zero:
"I once heard of a bookkeeper who, while working on the accounts of the Frobozz Magic Balloon Company, noted ...
- 5,701
34
votes
A rhopalic sentence of at-least 5 words, beginning with as long word as possible
7 words, starting at 14 letters, ending at 20:
You’d have thought this old left-winger would be supportive of his descendants’ views — but apparently not.
- 1,891
28
votes
Longest "De Bruijn phrase" in English
Using a bit of punctuation to make the meaning clearer.
De Bruijn 3
De Bruijn 4
De Bruijn 5
De Bruijn 6
- 1,894
27
votes
27
votes
Don't settle for a billion
using Tetration, we can get much larger than the simple exponentiation..
Move the top and bottom matchstick from the zero in the ten's place, and form a subscript "11" after the resulting "61111110" ...
- 444
26
votes
A rhopalic sentence of at-least 5 words, beginning with as long word as possible
Starting at 11 characters going to 19:
- 741
26
votes
Playing "Guess a Number" with myself
Make 10 identical pieces of paper. Make sure they're nice and opaque. (Card would be better than paper, if allowed.) Write "RIGHT" on one side of one of them, "WRONG" on one side of each other one.
...
- 117k
25
votes
Accepted
Infinitely long loaf of Bread
You can ask for the freshly-baked bread, grabbing it by its center and
- 7,909
24
votes
What is the longest rhymonym?
Since I don't think this is substantially worse than what's been suggested, I'll use it as a legitimate answer:
for a score of 46.
- 13.9k
24
votes
Longest "De Bruijn phrase" in English
I suppose you could easily get up to 8 using
This assumes that capitalization can be changed with each rotation (which makes sense, since you have to capitalize the first word of the sentence with ...
- 25.7k
24
votes
Don't settle for a billion
You could move the lower right stick in the six and the lower left stick in the first zero to make
_ _ _
|_ | | | | |_| | |
| |_ | | | | _| |_|
...
- 552
23
votes
Accepted
Playing "Guess a Number" with myself
Write the numbers 1-10 on 10 "answer" sheets of paper in different locations on the paper (one number per page).
Make ten corresponding "guess" sheets of paper that have holes (scissors or ripping) ...
- 483
23
votes
Don't settle for a billion
Using knuth's arrow notation
${\displaystyle 6\uparrow \uparrow 100}$
which represents ${{{6}^6}^{...}}^6$ (recursively raised to the power 100 times) which is a number so huge that i can not ...
- 333
22
votes
What is the smallest positive number on an 8-segment array? (no repeats)
I don't know if you can get smaller than
- 25.7k
22
votes
21
votes
3:3! It's a football score!
As you specifically said to think outside the box, I drew a box, and two three's (one Roman numeral and one Arabic numeral) which extend "outside the box". As my answer note that they divide the box ...
- 211
19
votes
19
votes
3:3! It's a football score!
Two threes:
How would you make 20, using two threes?
Solution:
With apologies.
- 1,535
19
votes
Accepted
What is the longest rhymonym?
Answer:
This might be a bit iffy but this has a score of 54
Not an actual answer below
And if you want to get technical:
- 1,644
18
votes
Playing "Guess a Number" with myself
Use amidakuji with ten columns numbered 1-10. The top row is the guessing row. You choose a number from the top and trace it down to the bottom. If you reach 1, your guess is right. Otherwise it's ...
- 5,667
18
votes
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible