Wednesday, February 17, 2016

FCC4K3S: Pie Eating Contest ANSWER

How did you do with this week's Mystery Monday puzzle? The answer is after the break!


This week's puzzle is based on the fact that Pi is an infinite non-repeating number, so any number combination can be found inside it if you search deeply enough.

The hints on the page were the date (3/14 or Pi day, since the first few digits of Pi are 3.14), the word "pie" which is a homophone for Pi, and the word "places" which has several meanings including the place that someone finishes in a contest, and the decimal place that a number occupies. The number of pies eaten by the winners also form the first five digits of Pi, giving you a guide on how to solve.

There are a number of "Irrational Number Search Engines" online, but my personal favorite for Pi is Angio The Pi Search Page, it has a smaller number of decimal places that it can search (only up to the two hundred millionth place, but that's more that sufficient for this puzzle.)

Under the "Digits of Pi" tab you can enter which place you want to look at, say the 55th place, and it will tell you the digit that appears there. Those numbers in the order given provide the coords.

At the coords you will find the "Peachoid" of Gaffney, SC.


The Peachoid is a one million U.S. gallon (3.8 million litres) water tower that stands outside Gaffney, SC. It was built in 1981 as a giant middle finger to the state of Georgia. At the time Cherokee County (the home of Gaffney) produced more peaches by itself than the entire state of Georgia, even though Georgia is known as the "Peach State."

The Peach was featured as part of the storyline of the first season of HBO's "House of Cards," Representative Frank Underwood (hence the CO name on the puzzle) is from Gaffney, and returns to town to deal with a legal battle surrounding the Peach.

So, how did you do with the puzzle this week?

By the way, if you are curious my experiment in hiding hints yesterday was a fail, the white text does not show up on phones and tablets, and so I will be sticking with the Rot13 text.

2 comments:

  1. Great idea for a puzzle! And we actually figured this one out for once! One comment: perhaps a better date would have been 3/14/15. Still, loved it. Newo Max

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  2. You can get white text to show on tablets if you import the page to notes, it shows there

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