Puzzles without solutions

[Orgasmic Troll]

honestly, I'm trying to remain light-hearted about this and refrain from taking this to a personal level, because this really isn't that big of a thing .. In fact, that's why I have a problem with it. Off-topic posts aren't the end of the world, and they aren't the demise of this forum, which as I understand it is an offshoot of the Lounge .. I think there should be more of a lounge-y feel to it, instead of being enforced with severity. Locking up a thread and posting a stern warning about it is a bit on the side of overkill in my opinion.

I also don't think that we need to be split up so that we can play nicely, nor does there need to be a deluge of different forums so that we can compartmentalize every post, puzzle and problem into its own category. This is just a forum where GIMPSters can toss some lighthearted brainfood around.

I can see where banging your head against a problem and expecting there to be a payoff would be frustrating, so I would consider it entirely appropriate to warn people first, and if they don't like problems of that sort, they can skip on past to the next one.

Wackerbarth, I appreciate your willingness to be the moderator of this forum. But this is not your forum. Please do not police it as if it were. This is our forum, you, me and everyone else in here. I have seen one thread in regards to any sort of rules for this forum, and it was only a protocol to avoid giving solutions away too soon. It said nothing of any kind about rules that seem to be your personal idea of what puzzles should be. If there are going to be enforced rules, at the least, give us a heads up of what they are first.

If I am misjudging you, I apologize, and I want to reiterate that I very much appreciate you taking up the moderator duties.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by Wackerbarth

The other side of the argument is that unsolved problems are *research topics*. A typical *puzzle* requires the reader to discover the often overlooked aspect of the problem that makes the solution *easy*. The pleasure comes from discovering that aspect.

... Stuff deleted ...

I, for one, am not interested in banging my head against a wall trying to determine whether the posted problem is a puzzle or a research problem. If I bother to look to see if there is some prior information, I will probably spoil the *puzzle*.

Personally, I'm happy for research problems to be posted here, as long as they are labelled appropriately.

For instance, in my n!+1 = m^2 problem there were two sub-puzzles. The first was labelled "easy" and the second "very hard". I thought the labels were accurate and informative; most everyone seemed to agree with the first label. In retrospect, perhaps the second label should have been "research problem" or "answer unknown to me" or the like.


Paul