17
There are two reasons your post was heavily downvoted:
Yes, this community generally dislikes progressive matrices. As you said, "it's similar to reading the author's mind" -- this is the mark of a bad puzzle. A good puzzle should have a path to the solution "built in" in some way - a bad one requires you to just try things until you happen to guess ...
14
The [lateral-thinking] tag was applied to this puzzle: "A puzzle solved through an indirect and creative approach, using reasoning that is not immediately obvious and involving ideas that may not be obtainable only using logic." You should expect creative answers.
There are two reasonable ways to deal with unexpected creative answers:
Continue to update ...
13
It's obviously impossible to comment on a specific user's reasons, but I think generally:
Conflicts with author's intent — On other sites in the network, this is purely about the core point of a question/answer, which is usually fairly unambiguous. On Puzzling, however, things get a little more subjective because the presentation is often an integral ...
12
I think this challenge is a textbook example (put intended!) of a math problem that is not a math puzzle.
I spent a bit of time working on this challenge and got a solution much like f'''s now-accepted answer, though less clean. But, I found this solution disappointing that I continued to look for something nicer, perhaps a cleaner expression or a different ...
8
Yes, this is the purpose of the "too broad" close reason here. We even have a custom close reason that may have fit better:
This question may invite speculative answers, as the question is not fully defined. The validity of some answers may be based upon opinion. Good questions for this site have a limited number of objectively correct answers. See also: ...
7
I don't think there's anything wrong with it, but I wouldn't have added it. My guideline for when to add tags (which could be very different from other people's) is that they should be added when:
someone might reasonably want to either...
see only puzzles with that topic, or
filter out puzzles of that type.
A bitcoin tag doesn't seem like it would be ...
7
TL;DR: No.
Traditionally, a metapuzzle (or "meta") makes use of answers from a number of mostly separate puzzles, each with their own themes and mechanics, to give a final meta answer.
For example, in the 2017 MIT Mystery Hunt, here was the relevant flavourtext from the Crafty Criminal quest:
As night falls, the city becomes even more confusing; ...
6
As you've already discovered, Snippets don't operate on Puzzling.
There's a strong preference to keep all puzzles self-contained on site. This is to keep content within the puzzle posting itself, so the puzzle does not become broken should the external link break, move, expire, or be deleted. I'm not as familiar with jsfiddle so don't know if it reaps ...
6
It's certainly a multi-stage puzzle: solve something, then the result is an essential component of another puzzle.
The boundary between multi-stage puzzles and metapuzzles is not perfectly clear (I think), and this is a thing we need to decide as well as discover. An earlier version of this answer claimed that "metapuzzle" was a term invented here on PSE, ...
6
Until a solution is posted, it's hard for us to say.
The difference between a maths puzzle (suited for Puzzling.SE) and a maths problem (suited for Maths.SE) depends essentially on the way it needs to be solved - see here. The criteria for a maths puzzle listed in the accepted answer there are:
Clever or elegant solution, often an "aha" moment.
Unexpected ...
6
Moderators' final decision
We have had extensive discussion in our Secret Moderators' Cabal, and I'm afraid the overall sense of the mod team is that it isn't appropriate to undelete the island question.
The reasons are largely those articulated by Rubio in his answer here:
the question itself is (as everyone agrees) bad
some of the answers are indeed ...
6
It's quite common in everyday English (and many other languages/cultures) to do this (with some words, like 'idiot' and 'moron'; there are probably words which are off-limits even in this context).
I see no reason why it should be disallowed on Puzzling Stack Exchange. We have a Code of Conduct but it mainly is about interaction with other people, not '...
5
I don't think anything is wrong with this puzzle. As of now, it has 7 up-votes and 5 fav-markers, so it's doing good. Just don't be impatient. Good puzzles may take a while to be tackled and not everybody posts during this "working" time.
I'm not sure if this is a valid assumption, but I sometimes wonder if "a lot of favorite-markers" mean something like:
...
5
Another thing you can do is to post and accept your own answer which collates/quotes from each individual poster's partial answers. Something along the lines of
The correct answer is:
First, you do this, as ghosts_in_the_code figured out here
....
Then, you do this other thing, as Kate Gregory figured out here.
...
And so on. Then you mark it Community ...
5
Your riddle, if I understand correctly, works on a simple principle, namely two different meanings of the same word. While this is a nice principle, the implementation is, IMHO, a bit weak: there are too few constraints on the desired answer, which broadens the list of possible answers. For example, I can think of at least three other answers, which I ...
5
I'll echo what @GentlePurpleRain has already said, and will add -
I would be most in favor of your last option, though again any of the 3 GPR noted would be fine. I only have this preference because you've already as much as admitted that due to issues with the puzzle's formulation you think it unlikely someone will ever get the intended solution. Rather ...
5
It seems that this particular situation has bothered you somewhat. If I understand it, you want to explain your side (including your reason for the accepted answer) clearly.
You can do this in comments or edit it in the text. I have seen both on this site. Of course if you chose to edit it in the text you will have to give the context and reasoning.
I, ...
5
Leave it open.
I'm going to start this answer in a controversial way, by quoting part of the site tour which actually doesn't usually apply here on Puzzling:
Focus on questions about an actual problem you have faced.
Obviously, this guidance is much better suited for sites like Stack Overflow or Software Engineering or Parenting than less practical sites ...
5
PSE gets an annoyingly large number of questions from people who are very clearly trying to cheat on aptitude tests. It is possible that I was too hasty in guessing that this was one of them. But consider the warning signs:
The question was very obviously taken pretty directly from some sort of examination or aptitude test.
These are usually (and I think ...
4
I wrote the answer you are looking to for your question's redemption. The comments that came from your question and its (self-)answer are still true and in my opinion fully justify the question being closed. In particular, this telling comment:
@SQB I don't want to be rude, but that twist is so trivial I'm not sure you can really call this a good puzzle. ...
4
Moderators won't undelete the original so you can edit.
Nor would they have to: even though it's deleted, it wasn't self-deleted, so you could still edit it to get it to a state where it was suitable for undeletion.
But I suspect any edit sufficient to salvage that question would turn it into a new question entirely and invalidate the existing answer.
If ...
4
I think any of 1, 2, and 4 are acceptable.
You might want to think about what your goal is.
Is your goal
to have someone solve the puzzle?
to offer an explanation the puzzle and what you feel was wrong with it?
to help others learn from your mistakes?
In any case, self-answering the puzzle is probably the direction you want to go, although there's ...
4
Our site policy
You can find our site policy on maths problems vs maths puzzles at Are math-textbook-style problems on topic?
So, what makes something a math puzzle rather than math problem? I think there's a few features.
Clever or elegant solution, often an "aha" moment
Unexpected problem statement.
Unexpected or counterintuitive result.
^ ...
3
That is the whole problem with riddles. You might have thought of a certain answer but you will find lots of different answers, many of which will make sense because riddles usually are "think out of the box".
And looking at your question, if you see the answers, from a neutral perspective, many of the answers make sense. Fame, pokemons(OK, maybe a little ...
3
If you look at the source of TVE II, it's linked as /q/40829 rather than the full question URL. That must be what causes it.
3
You can give the tick to whoever you like. It doesn't have to be whoever got the complete solution first. The tick is for the "best" (in the opinion of the asker) answer - "the answer that helped you most" on problem-solving sites like SO or Travel. What's more, you can move the tick if a better answer is posted.
People who post soon may be "giving away" ...
3
Having confirmed the answer has made me see it as more of a math problem rather than a puzzle, even though it did not seem so from the question.
(Spoilered)
3
It got deleted last september, I believe for plagiarism with a few others of Gamow's.
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