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CiSRA Puzzle Competition 2010 - Solutions

5C. Perception

The first thing to notice is that many tiles and portions of tiles in the image are the same physical colour, even if it doesn't look that way at first glance because of nearby lighting. To compare the colours of tiles without the psychophysical colour shift illusion caused by the coloured lighting, you can do one of several things:

  • Block out all surrounding colours.
  • Print the image and fold the paper to place colours directly next to each other.
  • Print several copies and cut them up to allow tiles to be moved around and compared.
  • Examine the RGB colour values on a computer screen.
  • Cut out swatches in a graphics program and move them around to compare them with other areas of the image.

Some of the tiles contain two different colours, where a line of shadow of the tower crosses the tile.

For each numbered tile, draw a line to each other tile that shares at least one colour with it. If that tile shares a colour with another tile, draw a line to that, and so on.

For each of the numbers 1 to 5, this draws a letter. The tiles 6, 7, and 8 don't share a colour with anything else, so they're just dots.

5C solution 1 5C solution 2 5C solution 3


5C solution 4 5C solution 5 5C solution 6


This spells out the message "FRIED..." Combined with the green colours used for the dots and the tower of green spheroids in the middle, this suggests the title of the popular film FRIED GREEN TOMATOES. We also accepted just GREEN TOMATOES, or the title of the book on which the film was based, FRIED GREEN TOMATOES AT THE WHISTLE STOP CAFE.