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.