Tag Archives: Puzzlin’ fool

There’s a method to my puzzly madness.

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Pattern-finding is not merely a staple of one’s puzzle-solving repertoire, it’s a fundamental part of innumerable scientific, mathematical, and sociological discoveries.

From the Golden Mean and the Pythagorean Theorem to the Platonic solids and instances of symmetry throughout nature, our ability to discern patterns from the chaos all around us has helped to define the rules governing our universe.

Those a-ha! moments come in all shapes and sizes, from discovering previously unknown planets (by observing inconsistencies in established patterns) to the simple joy of puzzling out whether the five-letter word meaning “kingly” that starts with R and ends with L is “REGAL” or “ROYAL”.

This combination of keen observation and associative thinking is key to solving a lot of puzzles and brain-teasers.

For instance, consider the following numerical progression:

49 50 53 54 ___ 58 61 62 65

Pretty simple, right? Just add 1, then add 3, and repeat, making 57 the missing entry in the chain.

How about this one?

J F M A M J J…

What comes next?

While this one isn’t as straightforward as the numerical one above, the same parts of the brain are lighting up as you assess the possibilities, toss aside those that don’t fit, and conclude that these can only be the months of the year, and A, for August, would come next.

And here’s one that combines aspects of our previous examples, which I mentioned in a blog post last year:

In this zero-to-ten puzzle, place the missing numbers.

8 5 4 _ _ 7 _ 10 3 2 0

Now, if you started with mathematical patterns, you’d be stymied pretty quickly. -3, -1, blanks, -7, -1, -2. Nothing jumps out at you.

Then the associative brain kicks in, and you look beyond the numbers. What could they represent? Letters? Syllables?

And then the sheer simplicity of alphabetical order hits you like a freight train full of Scrabble tiles, and you instantly know where to place nine, one, and six.

Of course, there’s a flipside to such intuitive leaps. It’s called apophenia.

Apophenia is the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena.

This is the sort of thinking that fuels conspiracy theories and false positives in scientific data, assigning causality to coincidence.

One step beyond apophenia, you have pareidolia, a psychological term for the mind’s obsession with finding patterns in essentially random objects. When people see a face on the surface of Mars due to shadow and geography, or they see the Virgin Mary in the burn marks on a grilled cheese sandwich, that’s pareidolia at work.

It’s all part and parcel of being a pattern-finder. Some patterns reveal the underpinnings of the universe, others just reveal you’ve been staring at a tile floor a little too long. =)

Oh, and before I go, here’s one more numerical progression for the road. Enjoy!

242 121 123 41 ___ 11 15 3 8

A day for puzzles and games galore!

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Aloha, friends and fellow puzzle fiends! Just a quick reminder that tomorrow (March 30th) is International TableTop Day!

For the uninitiated, International TableTop Day is the brainchild of Internet superstars and gaming devotees Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day, a day devoted to board games, card games, dice games, roleplaying games (RPGs), and any other communal game-playing activity played on a table or any convenient flat surface.

(And with so many puzzle-based games out there, from Boggle and Scrabble to Jenga and Hex, I think it definitely merits mention here on the PuzzleNation blog.)

While the term “TableTop” was originally coined to differentiate one style of gaming or roleplaying from another. TableToppers were your Magic card-carrying, dice-rolling, character sheet-wielding gamers, as opposed to those who played video games or engaged in Live-Acting Roleplaying (LARPing).

Obviously, the definition has since expanded to include many other types of games, so long as you play with others around a table.

As not only a self-confessed puzzlin’ fool, but a devoted player of Dungeons & Dragons and other RPGs, I’m happy to tell you that some of my all-time favorite puzzles have come from my experiences as a roleplayer.

I remember being trapped in a dungeon in my friend’s game, and there was this elaborate machine that would open the door with flowing water if you could direct the water properly. You did so by way of numerous levers located in various rooms around the dungeon. And as a bare-bones adventuring party, we didn’t have anything with which to draw a map of the labyrinthine corridors, so I basically had to memorize the route in my head, figure out what each of the levers did, then run around the dungeon pulling them in the precise order necessary to unlock the door.

It was mindbending and frustrating and a terrific time. That’s the kind of puzzle-gaming experience I’d love to share with others.

Since Easter is this Sunday and I’ll already be spending time with my nephews this weekend, I’m hoping to introduce them to some of my favorite board games and puzzle games. I’ll definitely be bringing my two-player version of Brick by Brick with me.

A variation on the classic Tangram-style of piece-moving puzzle solving, Brick By Brick puzzles offer a shadowed shape you need to form with irregularly shaped bricks. You can play by yourself or go head-to-head with an opponent, or even team up and use both sets of bricks to solve even tougher shadow puzzles. It’s great fun and a terrific brain-teaser.

I’m hoping it’ll be the gateway drug to other puzzle games as they get older, since they’re a little too young for some of my favorites. (Like U.S. Patent Number 1, the game where you’ve built a time machine, and so have your opponents, and you race to soup them up and travel back in time to register for the very first patent. It’s a blast.)

Oh, and Older Sister? Beware, I’m also bringing Upwords, a marvelous variation on Scrabble where you can place letters on top of other letters in order to form new words. You’re going down, sis!

Of course, in the midst of all this TableToppy goodness, I’ll be bending the rules a bit, since I also plan on sharing the spirit of International TableTop Day by playing some two-player PuzzleNation games with friends abroad. Hey, it’s much harder to gather around the table with an ocean between you.

In any case, I hope you indulge your puzzle fancy tomorrow with some communal puzzle-game goodness. Have a fantastic holiday!

I’m gonna need a stepladder.

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Plenty of places claim they offer large crosswords for the truly devoted solver, but nobody holds a candle to the Ukraine, whose citizens crafted this 100-foot-tall monument to puzzling.

Located in the city of Lviv (Lvov, to Russian speakers), the puzzle is an art installation perfectly designed to keep visitors thoroughly challenged. The clues are scattered on landmarks throughout the city, further encouraging both tourism and brain-boosting.

The puzzle appears incomplete during the day, but at night, special lighting reveals the answers in fluorescent paint.

I can only hope this will inspire other communities to raise the stakes even higher. Crop crosswords that can only be solved with Google Maps! Landscaping sudoku hedges complete with topiary set numbers! Cowboy-style word searches where you actually lasso words on cattle!

Okay, maybe not that last one. But hey! At least I’m trying! The artists of Lviv have set the bar — not to mention the grid — pretty darn high.

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*

You betcha!

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A few months ago, I posted a video of various bar bets that are perfect for the puzzle-minded prankster looking to earn a buck or two from an unsuspecting friend.

The same people behind that video have produced another, featuring 10 tricks and brain-teasers with which to baffle and challenge your friends. (Of course, if you keep bamboozling them out of money, they probably won’t want to hang out with you anymore, so use these tricks sparingly.)

Enjoy the following ode to visual trickery!

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!)