Teaser 2633: Magic mushrooms
From The Sunday Times, 10th March 2013 [link]
Enid and her famous five (Anne, Dick, George, Julian and Timmy) were joined by Pixie in a mushroom hunt. They each picked two varieties, the fourteen overall being:
Bird’s Nest, Beef Steak, Blue Toothed, Cannon Ball, Death Cap, Devil’s Um, Inky Cap, Old Man of the Woods, Parasol, Poison Pie, Stinkhorn, Slippery Jack, Tree Ears and The Gypsy.
For each of these hunters, if you wrote down their name and the two varieties of mushroom they picked, then for any two from the three you would find that there were just two letters of the alphabet that occurred in both.
What mushrooms were picked by: (a) Pixie and (b) Enid?
It seems likely that “Devil’s Um” is a typo for “Devil’s Urn” (which is a type of mushroom), however the answer to the puzzle is the same whichever you use, so I have stuck with the spelling used in the original puzzle and in the 2020 book.
Also, in Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, Timmy is a dog.
[teaser2633]
S2T2 
Jim Randell 8:52 am on 20 July 2023 Permalink |
The [[
grouping]] functionality in the enigma.py library was specifically written for puzzles like these.The following Python program runs in 61ms. (Internal runtime is 909µs).
Run: [ @replit ]
Solution: (a) Pixie picked Devil’s Um/Urn and The Gypsy. (b) Enid picked Blue Toothed and Slippery Jack.
The full solution is:
(Common letters are listed as: [name ∩ pick1, name ∩ pick2, pick1 ∩ pick2]).
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