A Spreadsheet Solution to H. E. Dudeney’s Puzzle “Visiting the Towns”

Mike C. PATTERSON
Daniel FRIESEN
Bob HARMEL

Keywords

spreadsheet solution, H. E. Dudeney, puzzle, Visiting the Towns

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present an optimization model approach to one of Dudeney’s puzzles, “Visiting the Towns,” which appears as puzzle number 243 in Amusements in Mathematics (Dudeney, 1917). Henry Ernest Dudeney (1857-1930) was one of the most prolific mathematical puzzle creators of the past two hundred years. His first collection of puzzles, The Canterbury Puzzles and Other Curious Problems, was published in 1907. This popular book is still in print today (Dudeney, 1907). Beginning in 1917, he created five other popular puzzle collections, three of which were published posthumously. In addition to prodigious quantities of puzzles, his range of puzzle-types was exceedingly large, including geometry-based, logic puzzles , combinatorics” (Bremner, 2011), “cryptarithmetic” (Kilpelainen, 2012), cross-number puzzles (Sit, 1991), and chess problems (Nowlan, n.d.). During his time, there were no calculators; his mathematical puzzles were approached through pencil and paper calculations.