Sorta — a free daily trivia game and ordering puzzle

Sorta Game puzzle #95 · October 13, 2026

Three rounds of five things, each with a hidden scale to sort them by — then one last guess at the theme tying all three together. Here’s what this puzzle asks.

1. Round 1

   Order these common digital actions by the time a typical modern system takes to finish them, from briefest to longest

   • A smartphone processor calculating a basic arithmetic sum
   • A personal computer downloading and installing a major annual operating system update
   • A laptop computer restarting from cold power-off to the desktop screen
   • A commercial search engine displaying query results across the web
   • A mobile device downloading a standard three-minute song over home Wi-Fi

2. Round 2

   Order these beamed communication signals by their one-way journey time through space or cable, from shortest to longest

   • A financial trade signal beamed via commercial microwave towers between Chicago and New York
   • An optical internet data packet traveling through an undersea cable between New York and London
   • A telemetry transmission beamed from the Perseverance rover on Mars to Earth at closest approach
   • A direct radio command sent from Earth to the James Webb Space Telescope at the second Lagrange point
   • A home Wi-Fi data packet traveling 15 meters across a living room

3. Round 3

   Order these peripheral hardware actions by the typical time required to complete them, from shortest to longest

   • A consumer laser printer warming its heated fuser roller from a cold standby state
   • A spinning mechanical hard disk drive positioning its read head over an interior data track
   • A consumer USB webcam capturing, encoding, and delivering a single video frame
   • A high-refresh-rate 240Hz gaming monitor drawing a single visual screen frame
   • A desktop inkjet printer feeding and advancing a blank sheet of paper into position

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