# Can You Defeat the Detroit Lines?

This week’s Riddler Express features a challenge drawn from the world of football analytics: In the Riddler Football League, you are coaching the Arizona Ordinals against your opponent, the Detroit Lines, and your team is down by 14 points. You can assume that you have exactly two remaining possessions (i.e., opportunities to score), and that Detroit will score no more points. For those unfamiliar with American football, a touchdown is worth 6 points.

# More Menorah Math!

This week’s Riddler Express deals with some menorah math that provides a good application for combinatorics: Tonight marks the sixth night of Hanukkah, which means it’s time for some more Menorah Math! I have a most peculiar menorah. Like most menorahs, it has nine total candles — a central candle, called the shamash, four to the left of the shamash and another four to the right. But unlike most menorahs, the eight candles on either side of the shamash are numbered.

# Can You Win This Hot New Game Show?

So the latest Riddler puzzle on FiveThirtyEight goes like this: Two players go on a hot new game show called “Higher Number Wins.” The two go into separate booths, and each presses a button, and a random number between zero and one appears on a screen. (At this point, neither knows the other’s number, but they do know the numbers are chosen from a standard uniform distribution.) They can choose to keep that first number, or to press the button again to discard the first number and get a second random number, which they must keep.

# Will Someone Be Sitting In Your Seat On The Plane?

This week’s Riddler puzzle on FiveThirtyEight features the following questions: There’s an airplane with 100 seats, and there are 100 ticketed passengers each with an assigned seat. They line up to board in some random order. However, the first person to board is the worst person alive, and just sits in a random seat, without even looking at his boarding pass. Each subsequent passenger sits in his or her own assigned seat if it’s empty, but sits in a random open seat if the assigned seat is occupied.