Category Archives: Puzzles

A-Ha Moments Stick in the Brain!

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It’s one of the best moments in puzzle solving.

When all the pieces click into place brilliantly. When the wordplay is unraveled. When the cryptic crossword clue is deciphered. When the trickery behind the riddle is revealed.

That rush, that satisfaction that coincides with overcoming the clever, devious creation of another keen mind.

The a-ha moment.

And it turns out that the a-ha moment isn’t just significant for puzzly spirits, it’s biochemically significant as well.

According to a study by Maxi Becker, Tobias Summer, and Roberto Cabeza, the brain remembers a-ha moments better than solutions reached through traditional methodologies.

From a report by Gizmodo:

As study participants solved brain teasers, he [Cabeza] and his colleagues recorded their brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging, a technique that measures changes in blood flow associated with brain activity. The brain teasers were visual fill-in-the-blank puzzles that revealed a previously hidden picture once participants completed the image.

And the brain activity resulting from an a-ha moment was comparable to the brain characteristics of important insight events. This means that the solutions derived from a-ha moments were remembered more clearly and with greater detail than those derived from traditional solving or process of elimination-style solving. Some of the solvers still recalled their a-ha moment solution a full five days later!

Researchers are already looking to revamp the ways we teach by utilizing techniques that inspire more a-ha moments, hoping that students will benefit more in the long term from inspiration-focused learning, rather than rote memorization.

Here’s hoping for more a-ha moments for all us! They’re good for the soul and good for the memory banks.

Happy puzzling, everyone!

Antonym TV Shows!

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In today’s post, I’ve got a silly little puzzly challenge for you. I’m going to give you the antonym of a television show’s title, and you need to give me the show.

For example, “Not at All Justified” would mean “Justified” or “Lawlessness and Chaos” would be “Law and Order.”

And yes, they do get wackier, more specious, and more elaborate as we go.

So, without further ado, let’s play!

ANTONYM TV SHOWS

  1. Enemies
  2. Found
  3. The Idle Alive
  4. Less Peculiar Nothings
  5. Misery
  6. Before Twelve
  7. Southern Obscurity
  8. Me
  9. Saving Adam
  10. White Non-Reflective Surface
  11. The First of Them
  12. Ugly Large Honest People
  13. Heaven’s Dining Room
  14. The Small Pop Certainty
  15. Very Vulnerable
  16. The Basses
  17. Unfettered Lack of Progress
  18. Water Walk
  19. Near Stay
  20. Many Whole
  21. Unseriousness Rises
  22. Truth Angel
  23. Attachment
  24. Drives and Work
  25. Minor Childless Man
  26. Keep a Potato in Pristine Condition
  27. Bullgirl Classical
  28. Legal Disobeys
  29. Uncertain Key
  30. Jeers

How many did you get, fellow solver? And how many did you groan at when you figured them out? Let me know in the comment section below!

New Rubik’s Speed-Solving Record: Blink and You’ll Miss It!

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Clever, quick-fingered solvers are constantly pushing the boundaries of what can be accomplished with a Rubik’s Cube.

I’ve seen the world’s most complex Rubik’s-style cube being solved, a building turned into a solvable Rubik’s Cube, and a Rubik’s Cube solved one move at a time by strangers across the globe.

I’ve even seen a Rubik’s Cube solved during a skydive.

But, amidst all those amazing achievements, there has been something lurking in the background. Over the years, there has been an escalating cold war in the world of Rubik’s Cubes.

The two sides? Human and machine.

The battlefield? Speed-solving.

Human speed-solvers often count their records in seconds, not minutes. The current record for a 3×3 cube solve is 3.05 seconds!

But speed-solving devices are often so fast that they end up ripping the cube to pieces instead of completing the solve. So puzzly designers must carefully walk a tightrope between speed and power in order to challenge speed records for mechanical solvers.

The record for an automated solve is an astonishing 0.305 seconds – ten times faster than the fastest human solve! — set by Mitsubishi Electric engineers in Japan in May 2024.

Or it was, until a few days ago.

The new Guinness World Record for “Fastest robot to solve a puzzle cube” belongs to Purdubik’s Cube, the robot created by Junpei Ota, Aden Hurd, Matthew Patrohay, and Alex Berta, a team of students from Purdue University’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The new record? 0.103 seconds.

It’s hard to fathom how quick that is. Thankfully, one of Purdubik’s Cube’s creators has an apt analogy:

“We solve in 103 milliseconds,” Patrohay said. “A human blink takes about 200 to 300 milliseconds. So, before you even realize it’s moving, we’ve solved it.”

Utilizing a combination of color recognition and finely-tuned industrial-grade motion-control hardware — guided by algorithms written by the students themselves — Purdubik’s Cube carefully accelerates and decelerates its movements faster than the eye can see.

And despite the fact that a team of four college students smashed a record previously held by a billion-dollar corporation, they’re not done yet.

They aspire to solve a Rubik’s Cube with Purdubik’s Cube in less than a tenth of a second! I don’t know how they expect to shave a few milliseconds off their time to achieve their goal, but you know what? I fully believe they can do it. In less than a year, they set their goal of a new Guinness World Record and achieved it.

Who knows what they’ll achieve next?

[You can read the full story of their journey from the initial goal to their world record success on the Purdue Engineering website. I highly recommend it!]

A Secret Egyptian Code Hiding in Plain Sight?

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Thirty-three hundred years ago, an obelisk was carved in ancient Egypt. It stood at the entrance of the Luxor temple as part of a pair.

Almost two hundred years ago, the obelisk was given to France by Egypt’s ruler. It stands at the Place de la Concorde in Paris, thousands of miles from its sibling in Egypt.

Two centuries of students and tourists and philosophers and photographers and scholars gazing at the obelisk, reading the intricately carved hieroglyphs.

Hieroglyphs were traditionally written in columns reading downward. But there are also left and right directional markers, marking the beginning of a sentence, often indicated by which direction a human or animal figure is facing.

As you can see, the placement of different symbols allows them to combine with others, both vertically and horizontally, to create different words or concepts.

And whomever did the inscriptions on the obelisk used the multidirectionality of the language to conceal messages in plain sight.

Even after centuries of study, it took a keen eye and some lucky conditions for Egyptologist Jean-Guillaume Olette-Pelletier to uncover the hidden messages.

You see, the obelisk was surrounded by scaffolding as part of its renovations, and this allowed Olette-Pelletier to get up close to the highest point of the obelisk and observe the inscriptions rarely seen by casual observers.

The hidden messages required him to read the hieroglyphs horizontally rather than vertically, and at a particular angle as well. This three-dimensional study of the inscriptions, known as crypto-hieroglyphs, allowed the creator to conceal messages that didn’t simply sing the praises of Pharaoh Ramses II, but actually point to his rulership as divine right, claiming his power came directly from the gods themselves.

It was propaganda, intended to reinforce the pharaoh’s status in the eyes of the elites of Egypt, cloaked in messages for the common people. (One of the messages, for instance, could only be seen by those arriving by boat, a privilege available only to the elite.)

For example, from an article in EuroWeekly News:

“People had not noticed that under [one of the drawings] of the god Amun, there is an offering table. This allows us to discover a sentence where no element is missing: an offering that the king gives to the god Amun,” Olette-Pelletier told BFMTV. Combinations of the newly identified inscriptions produce additional meanings in what’s called three-dimensional cryptography. In total, the Egyptologist identified seven encrypted messages across the obelisk’s various facades. He explained that the enigmatic text can only be understood by walking around the monument.

Imagine the creator of the obelisk, carving with specific angles and readers in mind, an iconic gift to the pharaoh… only for the code to be cracked thousands of miles away, thousands of years in the future, by a different kind of elite.

The puzzly kind.

That’s amazing.

Optical Illusions Made of Wood!

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Learning about the science behind optical illusions has been one of my favorite parts of this job. More and more, scientists are figuring out WHY optical illusions work on us, utilizing combinations of color, shadow, perspective, and how we process information to create impossible images, illusions of movement, and visual wonders to challenge how we interpret the world.

And I love seeing how people have responded by pushing the boundaries of what we can do with optical illusions. Earlier this year, I wrote about the glitch quilt, a fascinating and eye-wobbling work of brain-melting color play and meticulous execution.

In a world increasingly reliant on computer assistance and push-button AI-fueled shortcuts, there’s something both comforting and immensely charming about glitch quilts being handmade.

So it should come as no surprise to you, fellow puzzler, that I was overjoyed to discover another example of handmade optical illusion crafting… this time, made of wood.

This is the end grain optical illusion cutting board. It appears to bend and swirl and warp as you stare at it, despite being made of straight lines and alternating colors.

Although I discovered it through Obsessed Woodworking, this particular piece is the handiwork of Ryan Hawkins, who has a woodworking YouTube channel where he detailed the elaborate step-by-step process involved in creating this sturdy perspective-twisting delight:

Ryan, to his credit, pointed to another woodworking content creator who supplied the design plans for the cutting board: mtmwood.

mtmwood has numerous examples of handcrafted visual tricky, employing tessellations and tricks of perspective to fool the eye into following intricately laid patterns, and my favorite is easily one that they call the butterfly board:

Employing a similar technique to the optical illusion cutting board, but managing to shape four twisting patterns, is truly impressive and a testament to the hard work, skill, and technique required to bring these stunning pieces to life.

And, as you might expect, this sent me down a YouTube rabbit hole looking for other wooden optical illusions, and there are plenty to choose from.

This is a nicely executed attempt at showing dimension and depth to get us started.

Whereas this one walks us through all the stages of preparing to take a familiar optical illusion from a drawing to a three-dimension form:

I confess, I watched this next one three times in a row, trying to spot the seams:

I could go on and on, but honestly, instead of closing out on the illusions, I’d like to end this celebration of creativity and artisanship with a simple photo showing the preparation and painstaking work it takes to bring these pieces to life.

This is the optical illusion cutting board in its embryonic stage, a lineup of different pieces and thicknesses of wood. All marked and cut with precision, waiting for the next step in assembly. I stare at this picture, and consider every mark, every cut, every spin of the table saw’s blade as the creator runs piece after piece after piece through those whirling metal teeth, each of them perfect and crisp.

It’s a remarkable thing to ponder, and a joy to watch in both progress and in final realization. I’m glad I could share that with you today.

Happy puzzling, everyone!

A Puzzle Party for Reproductive Justice!

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There’s a long history of activism and advocacy through puzzles. Women of Letters, Grids for Good, Queer Qrosswords, These Puzzles Fund Abortion… these are just a few prominent examples of constructors and creators donating their time and puzzly efforts to benefit the world at large.

And the wonderful team at Frontera Fund are using puzzles to help raise awareness next Thursday, May 8th with their Puzzle Party event!

Cactus Valley Art in Harlingen, Texas, will be hosting the event.

There will be puzzles, community support, and discussions of the modern abortion access landscape and the challenges involved in ensuring that women and those assigned-female-at-birth have the support and resources they need.

This is a wonderful way to help get the word out. I hope that you’ll participate in the event, either by attending in person, by following through social media, or by donating to the cause!

I’d also like to take the opportunity to shout out These Puzzles Fund Abortion 5 . This year marks the fifth edition of the project, collecting 23 puzzles centered around social and reproductive justice themes, all for a minimum donation of $25.

If you donate $50 or more, you will also receive the puzzle packs for the previous four years of TPFA.

Whether you support Frontera Fund or the five important charities involved in These Puzzles Fund Abortion, I thank you for your time, your donations, and your participation in helping protect and provide healthcare for others.

Together, puzzlers can change the world.