Years ago when I was still in high school I somehow stumbled upon these and tried a few out (the one with the one time pad and the movie titles). I certainly w

Years ago when I was still in high school I somehow stumbled upon these and tried a few out (the one with the one time pad and the movie titles). I certainly was not ready to tackle them at the time, but even when failing I learned a lot. Years later I ran into a paper on finding the shortest path in a directed graph with negative cycles and it reminded me of all of my attempts to do the same. It is a shame they don't have a post-mortem after they retire the problems. I really enjoyed reading the break down of one of them ( http://conway.rutgers.edu/~ccshan/wiki/blog/posts/WordNumbers1/ http://conway.rutgers.edu/~ccshan/wiki/blog/posts/WordNumber... ) even though I did not attempt it.