Problematics | A password to puzzles with Jamie Lee Curtis

On December 19, 2022, I invited you to crack my password to the account where I store my puzzles. Since you did, I had to change my password for security reasons — and I used JAMIE LC for inspiration. Here are #Week30's puzzles.

A generation of film viewers will have been delighted when Jamie Lee Curtis won her first Oscar last week. In the 1980s, when video libraries lined a shelf or two with popular horror movies of the day, Jamie LC would feature in a number of these, starting with the original Halloween (1978).

Welcome to Problematics! (Shutterstock)

She is relevant to our puzzles too. On December 19, 2022 (#Puzzle 17.2), I had invited you to crack my password to the account where I store my puzzles. Since you did crack it, I had to change my password for reasons of security — and I used JAMIE LC for inspiration.

#Puzzle 30.1:

#Puzzle 30.1. Actress Jamie Lee Curtis after she won her first Oscar.

My new password contains the 7 letters J, A, M, I, E, L, C in a certain order. Just in case I forget, there’s a password recovery system based on the principles of Wordle. If I enter the 7 letters in the 7 given cells in any order, the cells will turn green (correct letter in correct position) and/or yellow (correct letter in wrong position).

Each of these three dummy passwords, for example, will give you three green cells and four yellow cells:

J	A	M	I	E	L	C
I	A	J	M	E	C	L
C	I	M	A	J	L	E

What is the password?

#Puzzle 30.2:

Time for an easy one now. Two children in a moving car observe that the street lamps appear to be evenly spaced. When the car is midway between two consecutive lamps, the brother starts a stopwatch and asks his sister to start counting the lamps. He stops the watch after exactly 1 minute.

“How many?” he asks.

“__ lamps in 1 minute,” his sister replies.

“Interesting,” their mother notes, looking at her speedometer. “If you multiply that count by 12, you get my speed in km/hr.”

Assuming they are indeed evenly spaced, what is the distance between any two consecutive lamps?

Mailbox: Last week’s solvers:

#Puzzle 29.1: Greetings, The number of cubes with: (i) one face red will be 6 (ii) two faces red will be 12 (iii) three faces red will be 8 — Adesh Benipal, Khanna

#Puzzle 29.2.

Solved both puzzles: Adesh Benipal (Khanna), Jasvinder Singh (Nabha), Parth Agrawal (Delhi), Joy Pandya (Mumbai), Harshit Arora (Delhi), Sunita & Naresh Dhillon (Gurgaon), Sunita Gupta (Delhi), Prakash Bhate (Mumbai), Abhishek Garg (Chandigarh), Arnav Singh (Ghaziabad), Vinod Mahajan (Delhi), Nipun Bamania (Mumbai), Mayobhav Pathak (Gurgaon), Pragya Khurana (Ludhiana), Dhanya Sangwan (OPG World School, Dwarka, Delhi), Amardeep Singh (Meerut), Biren Parmar (Bay Area, California), Kavya (Sonipat), Rahul Agarwal (Bay Area, California), Shishir Gupta (Indore), Sarang Sule (Mumbai), Savita Devi & Lucky Singh Randhawa (Mandawali, Delhi), Dr Savita (Sonipat), Pranjal Pawan Malpani, Hriday Rana, Bharti Budhiraja

The list excludes those who have given the answer to #Puzzle 29.2 without deriving it. They are among those credited below.

Solved #Puzzle 29.1: Archana Phadke (Pune), Rohan Bohra (Delhi-NCR), Umar Junaidi (Gurgaon), Nandita Singh (All Saints High School, Kalyan), Vansh Kaul (Gurgaon), Dr Sunita Gupta, Vineet Panchal (Mumbai), S Sanghamitran (Don Bosco School, Delhi), Satvik Dahiya (The Heritage School, Rohini, Delhi), Navdeep Kaur (Baba Farid Law College, Faridkot), Shailja Sharma (Delhi), Aayush Baweja (Gurgaon), Aryan Sood (Kapurthala), Aarav Mishra (Gurgaon), Aryaman Gheji (Mumbai), Anushka (Amity International School, Navi Mumbai), Sanjay Gupta (Delhi), Tanya Arora (Amritsar), Ishmeet Kaur (MGN Public School, Kapurthala), Sujatha Ramanan (Delhi), Amar Lal Miglani (Mohali), Akul Sharma (Delhi), Ayush Tandon (DTU), Disha Jaikumar Bhatia & Jaikumar Inder Bhatia (Ulhasnagar, Thane), Eti Mahajan (Oakridge International School, Mohali), Jayesh Sharma (Mandi Gobindgarh), Aurelia Lopez (Vasai), Hardeep Singh, Sanjeev Varghese, Rajiv Mishra

Apologies to Amardeep Singh for missing his name among the acknowledgements last week.

Problematics will be back next week. Please send in your replies by Friday noon to problematics@hindustantimes.com