Weekend Cachers

I think it's rather clear when looking at the title what our weekend activities consisted of... You guessed it, geocaching! We are still a far cry from the 1,000 milestone, but we are slowly working our way to it. We added eight this weekend and ended with 969 finds. The geocaching meeting/party on Saturday was a lot of fun, although the geocaching community does not appeal to many people our age. Not that it really matters, but a large majority of geocachers are retired or middle-aged folks whose kids are older than Laura and I. The great thing about it though, is we can all get together and still talk about geocaching and share stories of the adventures we have had while geocaching. After the party, about a dozen of us went geocaching in the dark to find a few caches, while we were waiting for everyone to arrive at the park we joked about a car driving past being a police officer. Everyone laughed and shared a story or two of their encounters with the police while geocaching. It seems to be a common encounter anymore! There were around 25 people at the party, which is by far the largest event we have been to, and we didn't realize there were that many people geocaching around Missoula.

With all the hype over the geocaching this weekend, Laura and I actually hid another cache. Usually we just place a cache somewhere for people to go find, but yesterday we designed a 'puzzle cache' that requires the finders to figure out a kakuro puzzle before finding the cache. What's a kakuro puzzle you ask? It's really a simple concept that can give you a lot of headache if you don't like doing some math. To solve the puzzle you fill in the light colored boxes with a number between 1-9. The light boxes are called the 'run' and the green boxes are the 'sum' boxes. So to find the answer, the numbers in the run boxes must add to the number in the sum box. The run boxes always are to the right or below the sum box which is split in half. If the number appears on the top of the sum box then you find the run to the right, if the number is in the bottom half of the sum box then you find the run below it. You can only use a number once in each run, meaning you can't use 4+4 to get 8, it would have to be 3+5, 2+6, ect. Corn-fused?

Let me use an example. Focus on the upper left section of the puzzle. The easiest way to go about solving the puzzle is to start with a corner and work from there. I usually start on the upper left. The next thing I look for is the smallest number with the smallest run. In this case, the 2x2 run for the 3, 8, & 16 are simple. The only two numbers which sum to 3 are 1 & 2 - so now it is a matter of figuring out which order they appear in.

The 8 is the next best area to sum, because we know the second box has to be 1 or 2, meaning the first box must be 6 or 7. To find out though, the 16 comes into play. If the first box were a 6, then that would mean the second box would have to be 10 in order to sum 16, since 1-9 are the only numbers allowed we can eliminate the 6 and we are left with the number 7. Since the number 7 goes in the first box of the 8 run that means the second box must be 1, which means the second box of the 3 run must be 2, ect..

The 41 obviously has many more numbers in the run, but I find that it is usually easier to move to another part of the puzzle and solve another area, just as demonstrated. I save the larger numbers until the end and find it is easiest for me.

Anyway, this is one of the first kakuro puzzles around the Northwest United States, but hopefully it isn't the last. Laura and I enjoy doing mathematical puzzles like this to find caches and hopefully others will try to create one as well. The puzzles can be easier than this particular puzzle, or they can be much hard and take hours, if not days, to solve.

If you aren't bored out of your mind after reading the mathematical explanation behind solving the puzzle then perhaps you can give the puzzle a try and see how you do. It took Laura and I around an hour to figure it out, and we felt we had some good skills with solving these types of puzzles. Heck, you can try to figure out the coordinates if you want. Just fill in the letters in the coordinates with the corresponding numbers from the puzzle. Here's a hint though, the coordinates are in Missoula, Montana.

N 4A'BC.DEF W 11G'0H.IJK

That does it for me. I think it's harder to explain the puzzle than it is to solve it! I need to not think for awhile. I better clean or fix something! Until again

-=Nolan=-