Category Archives: Puzzles

Puzzles in Pop Culture: MacGyver

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From Stanley’s love of crosswords on The Office to the clever conundrums constantly conjured by the Riddler in various iterations of Batman, puzzles have played roles both big and small in numerous TV shows and films.

In previous editions of Puzzles in Pop Culture, I’ve recapped a classic episode of M*A*S*H and discussed the numerous puzzle-centric episodes of The Simpsons.

This time around, we’re delving into the rich history of another famous TV puzzler, tinkerer, and all-around problem solver, Angus MacGyver.

Oh yes, make no mistake; while plenty of bullets were flying and criminal enterprises unraveling over the course of the show, MacGyver remained a puzzle solver through and through, displaying at least once an episode an almost-magical ability to solve brain teasers, mechanical puzzles, and other challenges.

True, the average puzzle-solving experience doesn’t usually include building an airplane out of bamboo or making a cannon from a garbage can and discarded cleansers, but a lot of the same skills apply, like abstract thinking and an affinity for combining contextual clues with a storehouse of personal knowledge and trivia.

At heart, I think we can all agree that when he wasn’t globetrotting, battling shadowy conspiracies, debunking UFOs, or encountering yet another ex-girlfriend in peril, MacGyver was probably doing the Sunday New York Times Crossword and solving Rubik’s Cubes with his feet.

And so, with that in mind, let’s take a look at a season-six episode of MacGyver titled “Eye of Osiris.”

In this Raiders of the Lost Ark homage/ripoff, MacGyver is recruited to help out at an archaeological dig seeking evidence of Alexander the Great’s tomb. (MacGyver has one third of a medallion that will supposedly lead to the tomb; the researchers have the other two pieces.)

As expected, there are criminal forces at work, and two (count them!) former foes of MacGyver’s are lurking in the shadows. The puzzling — well, poetry-decoding / riddle-solving, really — begins when MacGyver deduces the location of the tomb after the crooks steal the medallion.

(MacGyver, naturally, manages to reproduce the medallion from an imprint of the original in a box of sand.)

He and the scientists head for the tomb, only to be sealed inside with the criminals by an ancient booby trap. (Ain’t that always the way?)

Here, MacGyver confronts the first of the puzzles awaiting him inside the tomb, as the episode basically becomes a monsterless Dungeons & Dragons-style dungeon romp.

A statue of Anubis is in the room, along with a few dozen urns of different shapes and sizes. Naturally, Mac realizes they have to find the right urn, and it becomes a classic mechanical balance-the-weight puzzle.

When they do so correctly, a door opens, and they head into a grand crypt for Alexander the Great, with another elaborate mechanical puzzle (based on the Tree of Life, and requiring fire, water, and all kinds of elemental shenaniganry).

Any viewer who has been paying even the slightest attention can solve the puzzles faster than the heroes or villains, and soon enough, we earn our reward:

Yup, a sapphire the size of a small watermelon or a fat house cat, supposedly created when a meteorite crashed to Earth nearby.

Naturally, disturbing the sapphire activates another trap — closing walls this time — and more riddle-solving allows MacGyver and the scientists to escape the room before a giant stone smashes through the wall and chases them down a corridor. (Sound familiar?)

One last puzzle awaits our heroes before they escape, sapphireless but alive. (The various traps managed to thwart the villains for the heroes, as you’d expect.)

Once again, a solid knowledge of trivia and puzzling has saved the day!

Hope you enjoyed this little trip down memory lane. Until next time, keep calm, puzzle on, and I’ll catch you again soon.

P.S. It’s worth noting that I first saw this episode years and years ago while home sick from school. In the years before the Internet became the storehouse of all information, trivial and otherwise, I could find little to no proof that this episode existed as I remembered it.

Until a few years ago when I tracked the episode down on Netflix, I was half-convinced I’d conjured it in some sort of fever dream. *laughs*

Why do so many puzzles involve crossing rivers?

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Seriously, there’s the one with the cabbage, goat and wolf (and variations thereof), there’s the Bridges of Konigsberg, and this one. When it comes to weirdly common puzzle scenarios, it’s right up there with drawing paired socks at random and turning two triangles into four. Puzzlers might have too much free time on their hands. *laughs*

ANYWAY. I digress.

A buddy of mine sent me a brain teaser the other day, and it seemed like the perfect challenge for my fellow puzzle fans. Although it tends a bit more toward the mathematical-word-problem side than a straight brain teaser, I think it will get your deductive juices flowing!

Bridge and Torch

Four people come to a narrow bridge at night. Among them, they have one torch, which has to be carried in order for anyone to cross.

Only two people can cross the bridge at a time. Person A can cross the bridge in 1 minute, B in 2 minutes, C in 5 minutes, and D in 8 minutes. When two people cross the bridge together, they go at the slower person’s pace.

How can they all cross the bridge in 15 minutes or less?

(Oh, before I go… a quick bit of internet sleuthing reveals that this puzzle originated in Garth Sundem’s Brain Candy: Science, Paradoxes, Puzzles, Logic, and Illogic to Nourish Your Neurons. Credit where credit is due, always. Enjoy!)

When pigs fly? You’ve got yourself a deal!

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I’m a sucker for a good mechanical puzzle. Figuring out which piece goes where to complete a given item or accomplish a certain task is a staple of many roleplaying games and video games, and coincidentally, that’s one of my favorite aspects of each.

Rube Goldberg machines, perhaps the pinnacle of mechanical puzzle tinkering, never cease to entertain or amaze me, as you can tell by some of the videos Eric and I have posted in this blog over the last few months.

(They also make for excellent set pieces in movies, The Goonies and National Treasure providing two entertaining examples.)

Like many of those who enjoy mechanical puzzles, I can trace my interest back to the board game Mouse Trap, which featured an elaborate multi-stage trap to snare your fellow mice. I don’t recall ever actually playing the game as instructed. Instead, friends and I would freely add pieces, complications, rules, and new wrinkles to the mouse trap itself before setting off the trap with glee.

I have plenty of fond memories solving (and designing) mechanical puzzles of all sorts. Unfortunately, I’ve been having a difficult time sparking the same interest in my nieces and nephews.

Sure, I’ve gotten them all hooked on LEGOs, which is a marvelous start for the tinkerer spirit, but more often than not, the kids would build the sets precisely as instructed, and then just leave them that way. No disassembly, no experimentation to build their own sets and ideas.

None of them have a bucket of random LEGO pieces made up from the fragments of a dozen or so disassembled sets, or know the joy of digging through the bucket laboriously in order to find the one perfect piece to finish a creation of their own design.

Thankfully, my cousin delivered the ideal solution as a gift for Nephew #3’s birthday, discovered by chance at Wal*Mart. The Smart Lab Weird & Wacky Contraption Kit.

This thing is great. The goal is to build a path from the top of a velcro-friendly wall to the bottom for a marble to traverse, traveling down slides and through obstacles of all sorts, in order to reach the landing pad at the bottom, which launches a spring-loaded celebratory pig into the air!

It’s similar to plenty of pipe-and-marble toys from years past, but with a lot more adaptability and flair, and it was an instant hit. Not only did every niece and nephew want a turn designing their own contraption, but they freely made suggestions (helpful and otherwise) for each other’s designs.

The best thing about it? When designs failed or the marble stalled, the kids didn’t get disheartened. It just encouraged them to try again and indulge their cleverness even further. It was a blast simply to watch.

And you better believe the adults got into it too, adding new wrinkles and complications to each contraption, and cheering just as loud when the pig was launched into the air after a successful run.

My cousin was roundly praised as king of the gift-givers that day, and I’ve been recommending the toy far and wide ever since. It’s a great mechanical puzzle and a fun time all at once. And it’s got a flying pig! What more could you want?

PuzzleNation Book Review: The Puzzle Lady vs. the Sudoku Lady

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Welcome to the third installment of PuzzleNation Book Reviews!

All of the books discussed and/or reviewed in PNBR articles are either directly or indirectly related to the world of puzzling, and hopefully you’ll find something to tickle your literary fancy in this entry or the entries to come.

Let’s get started!

Our book review post this time around features Parnell Hall’s novel The Puzzle Lady vs. the Sudoku Lady.

Cora Felton is known far and wide as the Puzzle Lady, powerhouse puzzlemaker and occasional crimesolver, but her reign may be over. Minami, the Sudoku Lady, has come from Japan to challenge Cora for pride, PR, and puzzle-bragging rights. But when dead bodies start turning up and Minami is fingered as the culprit, it’s up to Cora to clear the competition’s good name.

Now, before I get into the review, it’s confession time. This is the second time around for me with this book. I read it a few years ago, and didn’t particularly enjoy it. But I was also sick as a dog at the time, so I wanted to be sure that my general foul mood at the time didn’t impair my ability to appreciate what I was reading at the time.

Turns out my illness had nothing to do with it.

The Puzzle Lady vs. the Sudoku Lady is part of Parnell Hall’s Puzzle Lady Mystery series — which he’s been publishing at the rate of a book a year since 2000 — and I sincerely hope it’s not indicative of the rest of the series. The reader plows through a needlessly convoluted story, confronted by a population of unpleasant characters and a protagonist who is unlikable in the extreme. She’s more grating than curmudgeonly.

Now, to be fair, that’s not to say that bright spots in the novel don’t exist. Hall has a natural adeptness with wordplay and his nigh-Vaudevillian exchanges of dialogue are engaging. Sadly, however, both are severely undermined by the unsympathetic cast of characters.

The sudoku and crossword puzzles included within are both an interesting gimmick and a pleasant treat; my own penchant for puzzling would not be ignored, and I solved each puzzle as it appeared. Unfortunately, those were calm spots in an otherwise stormy narrative.

I must conclude that The Puzzle Lady vs. the Sudoku Lady is at best an uneven reading experience. (Though I might try another Puzzle Lady Mystery someday, for curiosity’s sake.)

Well, I hope you enjoyed the latest installment of PuzzleNation Book Reviews, and I look forward to more book discussions in the future. In the meantime, keep calm, puzzle on, and I’ll catch you later.

Time to get puzzlin’.

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Association is a powerful force when it’s time to give gifts. If someone doesn’t know what to get you, the mind immediately turns to what that person associates you with.

For instance, I’m a fairly rabid Star Wars fan, and have been ever since I was little. Friends and family know they can rarely go wrong giftwise when it comes to interesting Star Wars swag.

(So says the proud owner of TWO Star Wars LEGO alarm clocks. Oh yes, I can choose between light side and dark side wake-ups, since I have both Anakin Skywalker or Darth Vader. Jealous?)

That kind of association can be a real treat, since you might receive a wholly unexpected and very welcome present simply because someone associated you with a neat little trinket or object.

The reason I bring this up, especially in January, is because my sister couldn’t make it home for Christmas, so we had a late holiday celebration for her last week. And when she and I exchanged gifts, she surprised me with the following bit of puzzly delightfulness…

Oh yes, the perfect time-keeping accoutrement for my burgeoning Puzzle Lair. (Things just sound cooler when you make them mildly supervillainous.)

And best of all? I had no idea these even existed until I received one as a gift.

So, thanks Sis, and thank you, Association. You’ve hooked me up with sweet swag once again.

Octopuzzling!

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Fellow puzzlers, I must apologize. Over the last few months, I’ve attempted to cover as wide a swathe of the puzzling community as possible in my blog posts, but I failed.

Make no mistake, I’ve done a pretty decent job of it, exploring everything from puzzle tattoos and Halloween costumes to brainteasers both new and old, from puzzle references in movies and TV to writing clues and book reviews.

But I’ve managed to neglect an entire sector of the puzzle-loving community: non-human puzzlers.

Oh yes, I’ve been unintentionally speciesist, and that stops today. Let’s take a look at Earth’s other great puzzle-solving creature: the octopus.

Think I’m kidding? Hardly.

Scientists have repeatedly found that octopuses can solve mazes, remember solutions, and apply past experience to new puzzles. They are infinitely curious and adaptable puzzle solvers in their own right.

In fact, some researchers have taken to offering what are known as “prey puzzles” to octopuses in captivity in order to study how they learn, as well as their dexterity, both mental and physical.

From locked boxes to screw-top jars and bottles, prey puzzles have all been solved with relative ease by octopuses. (In fact, Lucy the Puzzle-Solving Octopus — which should really be a children’s book or a kids’ TV series — has been the subject of several articles.)

True, they’re not exactly solving Rubik’s Cubes or decoding cryptograms, but they do impressive mechanical puzzle-solving for a species lacking thumbs, don’t you think?

So, it is with deep regret that I apologize to the octopus community for ignoring your puzzle-solving skills for so long. It shan’t happen again, I assure you.

And now, as a final act of contrition, I give you the following video, featuring a poorly-filmed octopus solving a fairly simple prey puzzle in under two minutes. Enjoy!