A Riddle (please read details before posting answer): Five hundred begins it, five hundred ends it, five in the middle is seen; first of all figures, the first of all letters, take up their stations between. Join all together, and then you will bring before you the name of an eminent king. What's the solution?

I think I have it. It took me about two or three minutes, I think. I probably cheated, because I did have to go look something up.

Got it, took a minute (once I realized what it was asking for).

I got it in about a minute, but I did have to look up one thing…

yeah I got it, after about half a minute.

42
And it took me just a few seconds.
I am a genius!

500A5A500?
must be some robot king or something, right?

@ragingloli you’re on the right track, but keep going…

It took me five minutes, dad, it was my question. And it was 5 am :)

@brinibear welcome to the fluther, daughter-o-mine!

Can I guess now?

Michael Jackson?

Wait! I got…crap
I cheated. I had to look something up to know its meaning and then the riddle and answer appeared. I didn’t mean to, but it did. Sorry. :( It took me half a minute to find the solution.
GQ

I gave up after 5 minutes, but did find the answer…I would have never gotten it.

Haha so what’s the answer?

David.

D is the Roman Numeral for 500
V is the Roman Numeral for 5
The “first figure” is either the word “I”, or the number 1, which has a Roman Numeral of I, so either way, that works out.
The first letter, of course, is A

Put them all together, and you get DAVID

@peyton_farquhar, @MrItty, you got the answers. I wanted a few more flutherites to have a chance to try before we posted the answer.

that’s why I asked that we wait…

@MrItty quick…..edit your response…..
Don’t want to ruin it for other flutherites…now wouldn’t you?
:)

Holt shit! My bad I thought the answer was already said since everyone was saying that they got it. Dammit! I’m sorry

About sixty seconds. I misremembered 500 and started with 50. No research.

How long did it take you, @Yetanotheruser?

It’s Kong!

@Jeruba, since you asked, I was sitting here with @brinibear. She read it from another forum she had seen and I got it in about 15 seconds (Not bragging, but I live for puzzles and riddles)

I once was told a ‘riddle’ that was so ff-ing simple once i knew the answer, but almost made me end up in a psychiatric hospital.
A friend of mine told me there was this planet where they did had soap, but no showers.
Bicycles, no cars. Facebook, no Fluther. Blablabla, no etcetera.
For days he was giving me these clues, and i never got it. Now that i write it down i feel even more stupid, cos it is so obvious.
Anyway, there goes.

My apologies. I thought @Tink1113 and @peyton_farquhar‘s responses indicated the time to explain the answer had come.

@rebbel, that sounds like a variant of “puzzle but not enigma,” but I don’t see enough of a sampling to discern a pattern. Maybe @Yetanotheruser does.

@Jeruba Hrmmm, i don’t know this ‘puzzle but not enigma’-thing you talk about, i’m sorry.

Things without an “r” in the spelling, but nothing having an “r” in the spelling?
Is it “Planet Arless”?

Luve for you, Lex!

Planet of the Apes, but not of the Apers.

The original one took me about 15 seconds, mostly in figuring out who “D1VAD” was.

i must know just enough not to confuse myself.

For example, the Greeks had a system of using letters of their alphabet for numbers(alpha=1, beta=2, ...), but i can’t recite far enough into the Greek alphabet from memory to figure out what letter would represent 500, especially because i don’t know whether pi was 20 (instead of 3.14…?<grin>). There’s probably a “sweet spot” of knowledge for doing this kind of puzzler (as there is for answering SAT questions)—knowing any more than that much probably hangs you up on disorienting, far-fetched possibilities. Here’s one that actually occurred in the SATs: in a “pick out the one word out of five that is spelled correctly” question, there occurred “intensional” (along with another word that was spelled correctly). So someone who knew the word “intensional” might have gotten confused, unless they were up on yet the next level of smartness (as with EA Poe’s / Auguste Dupin’s marbles-guessing boy) and figured out that the none of the question editors had known that “intensional” was a word.

It took me 5 seconds. I had to scroll down to @MrItty answer. haha.

@Jeruba Thanks for the props. I had to go away and didn’t get back before @LexWordsmith posted the answer. I was having some difficulty with that one

i remember seeing a puzzle in the Mathematical Games column of a December issue of Scientific American. It showed a line drawing of a star-like ornament that somehow had 25 internal and external vertices, each labeled with a letter of the English alphabet, and it was the columnist’s Christmas greeting to the readers. i regret that i can’t show you a graphic of it, but the puzzle was, “What is the Christmas greeting?” so this way the puzzle is even harder. i’ll be back tomorrow with the answer, if no one has gotten it.

I forgot to say, “a different letter”—that is, 25 different letters were used.