Even if you’ve only been caching for a short time I’m guessing that you’ve encountered
one or more next-to-impossible puzzle caches. There are a lot of people out there who love to come up with the
most devious, unsolvable puzzles. Fight fire with fire I say! I recently ran across this puzzle that you
can use in your next puzzle cache to confound everyone (and I mean everyone):
A hundred prisoners are each locked in a room with three pirates, one of whom will walk the plank in the morning. Each prisoner has 10 bottles of wine, one of which has been poisoned; and each pirate has 12 coins, one of which is counterfeit and weighs either more or less than a genuine coin. In the room is a single switch, which the prisoner may either leave as it is, or flip. Before being led into the rooms, the prisoners are all made to wear either a red hat or a blue hat; they can see all the other prisoners' hats, but not their own. Meanwhile, a six-digit prime number of monkeys multiply until their digits reverse, then all have to get across a river using a canoe that can hold at most two monkeys at a time. But half the monkeys always lie and the other half always tell the truth. Given that the Nth prisoner knows that one of the monkeys doesn't know that a pirate doesn't know the product of two numbers between 1 and 100 without knowing that the N+1th prisoner has flipped the switch in his room or not after having determined which bottle of wine was poisoned and what colour his hat is, what is the solution to this puzzle?
OK, it’s not a real puzzle. It’s from the Car Talk website. I can just hear Tom and Ray yuking it up over this one.
But wait! Maybe there really are geocache coordinates hidden here. Maybe I just need to take all the digits mentioned, assign each of those a letter and use that as the key to a Vigenère cipher to decipher the text of the puzzle which will yield a Morse code pattern when spelled out on the buttons of a phone where an odd digit represents a dash and and even represents a dot. Then once I have the Morse code decoded it will tell me to look up all the number one hit singles from 1972 and take the 4th letter from each one. Using those letters...OK, now it’s just getting silly.
Aren’t puzzle caches fun ;-)