VeeshanVault

Is Petals Around the Rose really a game? Well actually it's more of a puzzle or a brain teaser. Are you up to the challenge?

Read what happened when Bill Gates was introduced to the Petals Around the Rose puzzle in June 1977. How he tackled this brain teaser is an interesting insight into the man at the helm of Microsoft.

I came across this brain teaser and the story of it being shown to Bill Gates and got interested in figuring it out myself... It didn't take long, so one day at worked I whipped up a web based version.

http://www.petalsaroundtherose.com

Check it out... FYI You're not supposed to tell anyone the secret, but you can prove to them you know by guessing the answers to the rolls. Show your friends how much better than them you are, if that's your thing.

* The name of the game is Petals Around the Rose, and that is important.
* The answer is either 0 or an even number.
* I can tell you the answer for any given roll of the dice.

p.s. it wouldn't kill you to click an ad

i got it after 2 reveals

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this seems like an exercise in "keep it simple, stupid"

clicked some ads

That was pretty difficult, mostly because a couple of the strategies I was trying worked about half of the time. I blame the RNG.

Yeah, i had a strategy that worked like 5 times in a row, before it failed.

I really feel stupid when I figured it out.

Yeah, I eventually gave up and Googled it. I'm glad I did, as I wouldn't have guessed it anytime soon with the strategies I was using.

Figured it out after re-reading the article. Clever game. Gotta try it on my coworkers to prove my dominance as Master Teacher.

It's annoying that the article, and the application, don't bear a direct relation to the game as played with real dice. Unless you're switching the dice out every roll, which has no bearing on the result...

That's a good game, reminds me of river crossing problems.

Zaelath wrote:It's annoying that the article, and the application, don't bear a direct relation to the game as played with real dice. Unless you're switching the dice out every roll, which has no bearing on the result...

What are you referring to.... the colors?

Fash wrote:

Zaelath wrote:It's annoying that the article, and the application, don't bear a direct relation to the game as played with real dice. Unless you're switching the dice out every roll, which has no bearing on the result...

What are you referring to.... the colors?

Yeah. Just in that the colours of the dice changing is a red herring that wouldn't be present if you were playing the game in reality. You could change dice out between rolls, but doesn't seem to be the case in the story, just made the web page look prettier

Zaelath wrote:

Fash wrote:

Zaelath wrote:It's annoying that the article, and the application, don't bear a direct relation to the game as played with real dice. Unless you're switching the dice out every roll, which has no bearing on the result...

What are you referring to.... the colors?

Yeah. Just in that the colours of the dice changing is a red herring that wouldn't be present if you were playing the game in reality. You could change dice out between rolls, but doesn't seem to be the case in the story, just made the web page look prettier

Yeah.. I've told people the colors don't matter when I've shown them it... I just decided to do it as the article did, to throw some people off.

I'm not, in any way, pretending to be an overly intelligent person... but I got this within 5 minutes of looking at it.

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Fuck, I didn't even know what I was looking for at first. I hit the "reveal answer" a few times and recalled the whole "The name of the game is Petals Around the Rose, and that is important" thing and it was honestly pretty easy. Took like 3 rolls to figure it out and another 3 or 4 to confirm it.

Oh, the colors would have severely thrown me off if I hadn't read this thread first ,by the way. You might want to consider changing it. I don't think I'd have figured it out if I hadn't known the colors were irrelevant, honestly. Although maybe that's part of the puzzle, I don't know.

Bagar- wrote:Oh, the colors would have severely thrown me off if I hadn't read this thread first ,by the way. You might want to consider changing it. I don't think I'd have figured it out if I hadn't known the colors were irrelevant, honestly. Although maybe that's part of the puzzle, I don't know.

The colors were a major factor in the amount of time it took me, and I wonder what color dice they used when Bill Gates was trying to figure it out?

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My first thought was that the rose had to do with whichever die came up red. After that proved fruitless, I was trying to add up all the pips and figure out if I needed to add the blue ones and multiply by green, or subtract red and divide blue... the colors are really what make this game difficult

So should I eliminate the colors? would only take me a second.

I'm sure when Bill Gates saw it, they were all one color (and it still took him 2 hours.)

I'm glad that some of you enjoyed it

take the colors out so these ignoramuses can stop using them as an excuse

Fash wrote:So should I eliminate the colors? would only take me a second.

I'm sure when Bill Gates saw it, they were all one color (and it still took him 2 hours.)

I'm glad that some of you enjoyed it

Most implementations of it that I have seen have used colors, more than likely to throw people off. No clue if it was part of the original game. Even Borrett's implementation has them : http://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-j.htm .

I had an idea what it was and was correct my first guess. To prove I was right I went through 6-10 more rolls and was correct every time.

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Either I've seen this before and don't remember, or I just looked at the clues entirely different or something. The one that gave it away to me was the petals around the rose is the name of the game, and that's important. The colors didn't come off as mattering at all to me, because it didn't specify a red, blue, or green rose and I've seen roses in all kinds of crazy dyed colors. I looked at the dice and thought, if the name of the game is important, what the hell can be the "rose"? The only guess I had was any die with a center dot, which happened to fulfill the other clue of always being an even number or 0.

The colors screwed me up for a bit. If that's how they were originally, that's fine but if not, that's definitely an extra layer that Bill didn't have to deal with.

The colors only screwed me up until I got to a roll with all green/blue and it still had an answer that wasn't zero.

I used to know this game as "Polarbears fishing" using old school white dice with black pips.

Didn't even notice the colors, first time through. Perhaps it's just individual minds and the way they operate. Some people used the colors while others ignored them.