Reply #45: Agreed...

[RoyGBiv]

I forwarded this to my ex-wife, the math professor, to get her take on it. I have a suspicion it will take her longer to solve it than it did me. I base that on the fact it always takes her a long time to solve puzzles based on things like this. But there is no doubt she is an extremely intelligent person.

It took me a dozen or so rolls. (I wasn't counting actually.) Math is not in any way my strong point, and I suspect this may have helped. I abandoned potential mathematical solutions quickly because they were making my head hurt. I just looked at the words, then the patters, then the words again, and it finally hit me. It's a symbolic problem disguised as a numbers problem that plays on how we deal with language.