纽约一分钟
New York Minute
题目详情
The Jane Street Puzzle Master has twenty-three errands – don’t worry, almost all of them are tiny! – that she needs to cross off her to-do list (above) on her day off. (Each errand is at least 4 letters long.)
If she can manage that small task, she plans to meet up with some friends tonight for a short while. Can you figure out where they’ll meet up, and why?
解析
Original Explanation
The puzzle master’s to-do list is a word search with a punny twist! Famous NYC locations / experiences / etc. are scattered about the grid with substitutions to some of the letters. Diligent solvers found these substitutions to be consistent across the answers, they were
d -> c
c -> m
m -> μ
μ -> n
n -> p
p -> f
f -> a
a -> z
z -> y
The strange μ in there, and the references to small – or “minute”, in the maɪˈnjuːt sense – things throughout the text, clued that this substitution was generated by moving one rung down the metric prefixes ladder: these are the symbols for deci, centi, milli, micro, nano, pico, femto, atto, zepto, and yocto. With that guide in hand, one can undo the substitutions and arrive at the grid above. (Changed letters are in green.)
The 23 tasks that now appear in the grid are:
Bronx Zoo
Brooklyn Bridge
Central Park
Chinatown
Cloisters
Coney Island
Duane Reade
Grand Central
High Line
Holland Tunnel
Koreatown
La Guardia
Lincoln Center
Madison Square
New Museum (newµseum :-)
Radio City
Statue of Liberty
Stone Street
subway
taxi
Wall Street
Yankee Stadium
Zabars
The unused letters (boldfaced and underlined) spell Little Italy. Seems apt, don’t it?
Congrats to this month’s solvers!