快猫短视频

#227 A great deal of magic

Set by Brian Hobbs

鈥淐an I have a volunteer?鈥� Max the Magnificent asks his handful of onlookers.

A hand goes up. 鈥淕ood!鈥� he exclaims. 鈥淵ou there, madam. I will now blindfold myself and hand you this ordinary deck of 52 cards. I would like you to flip over exactly 26 of the cards and return them to the deck, then shuffle thoroughly.鈥�

When the deck is returned, Max appears to feel, tap and listen to the cards, then cuts them into three piles before restacking them. 鈥淎nd now, miss,鈥� he says. 鈥淲ould you please shuffle once more and deal out the cards into a pile for you and a pile for me?鈥�

When she does this, Max flips over his pile and sure enough, as the two hands are examined, they each have exactly the same number of face-up cards.

鈥淚mpressive,鈥� whispers Marcus.

鈥淗e鈥檚 certainly a good showman,鈥� replies Nina. 鈥淏ut you and I could have pulled off that 鈥榯rick鈥� with little difficulty.鈥�

No sleight of hand or other hidden trickery was involved, so how did Max accomplish his feat?

Solution next week

#226 On reflection

Solution

The text reads: A MAN A PLAN A CANAL PANAMA.

The string of letters is the same forwards and backwards, so it must encode a palindromic set of words. The majority of the letters are X, which suggests X is probably a vowel or very common consonant, such as T. If the first space comes after the first letter, the first word can only be A or I. If it is A it would be as follows: A *A*A**A*A*A*A**A*A*A. Not many words have alternate As. Some examples are llama, lava or longer words such as banana鈥� and Panama. Panama reverses to make 鈥淎 man a p鈥� and leads to the classic palindrome: A man a plan a canal Panama. (Other palindromes you can spot within the puzzle are Hannah, wow and aha.)