How Old Is Ann?
The older I get, the more sense it makes when the phrase “some years ago” turns out to refer to something from two decades back. The problem, apparently first published in the New York World circa 1903-10-09,[1] goes like this: Mary is 24 years old. She is twice as old as Ann was when Mary was as old as Ann is now.
- ▪The older I get, the more sense it makes when the phrase “some years ago” turns out to refer to something from two decades back.
- ▪The problem, apparently first published in the New York World circa 1903-10-09,[1] goes like this: Mary is 24 years old.
- ▪She is twice as old as Ann was when Mary was as old as Ann is now.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Arthur O’Dwyer |
| Canonical URL | https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2026/07/29/how-old-is-ann/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 30 Jul 2026 12:14:23 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-30T14:22:07.997Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-30T14:22:07.997Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
How old is Ann? From “Topics of the Times,” New York Times of 1924-11-17: The amount and quality of intelligence utilized in the working out of cross-word puzzles almost precisely equal those that were revealed some years ago when an amazing — and discouraging — army of Americans filled the newspapers that cater to such folk with triumphant solutions of an arithmetical problem concerning the age of a supposititious Ann — a problem that any eighth-grade boy or girl who is “all there” should have solved in his or her head in about thirty seconds. The older I get, the more sense it makes when the phrase “some years ago” turns out to refer to something from two decades back.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Arthur O’Dwyer.
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