Don's Amazing Puzzle

Monday, March 3, 1997 by Dave Winer.

Please read this sentence.

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE-

SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIF-

IC STUDY COMBINED WITH

THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.

Count the F's.

How many did you find?

To see the answer, scroll down the page until it appears.

Dave

PS: Thanks to Don Brown for forwarding this. It's a great puzzle!

Solution Solution">

There are six F's in the sentence.

There is no catch.

I found three. I went back and counted and recounted, and I was sure there were just three. So I wrote a script to see what was going on. It said there are six! Mystifying.

Then I improved the script to show me where the F's were.

ct = 0;
s = "FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE-SULT 
OF YEARS OF SCIENTIF-IC STUDY COMBINED 
WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.";
for i = 1 to sizeof (s) {
dialog.alert (ct)

Right on, there is no catch.