Tag Archives: Puzzlin’ fool

Puzzles in Pop Culture: Parks and Recreation

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In a previous installment of Puzzles in Pop Culture, Amanda of amandalovesmovies suggested checking out a puzzle-centric episode of Parks and Recreation. Well, Amanda, your wish is our command, and by wish, I mean suggestion, and by command, I mean I finally got around to tracking down the episode in question.

Today we’ll be exploring puzzly goodness of the Season 4 episode entitled “Operation Ann.”

It’s Valentine’s Day in Pawnee, and town employee Leslie Knope has gone all out, as per usual. Not only has she organized a Valentine’s Day dance in the hopes of finding someone for her best friend Ann, but she’s cobbled together an elaborate scavenger hunt for her boyfriend Ben. (The final clue will tell him where to meet her that night.)

His first clue is a cryptex, a locked cylinder popularized by The Da Vinci Code, and the five-letter code that opens it is a word that represents their third date. Ben is totally stumped, and turns to affable dolt Andy and mustachioed he-man Ron for help. Ron smashes the cryptex open with a hammer.

Inside is a rhyming clue pointing toward several murals throughout City Hall. Ron instantly deduces that the next puzzle is an acrostic, requiring the first letter of each marked mural. The three men split up and gather the necessary letters, which Ron then solves with impressive anagramming skills.

It’s worth noting that throughout this adventure, Ron repeatedly states how much he hates riddles, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Ben is now totally reliant on Ron’s help, and as it turns out, their next clue leads directly to Ron. (Leslie has managed to hide a clue on the bottom of Ron’s shoe.)

They discover there are TWENTY-TWO more clues to go. Ron again states that he hates riddles. They decide to split up, as Ben heads for the snow globe museum, Ron to a local bar, and Andy sticks around City Hall.

Their hunt continues in the following video clip:

As Ben begins to despair that he’ll disappoint Leslie by not finishing the scavenger hunt, Ron delivers one last time, suggesting that the only thing Leslie likes more than making people happy is being right. So Ben considers anything that Leslie changed his mind on, and quickly figures out where she is. Valentine’s Day is saved!

In a hilarious episode chock full of puzzle fun — anagrams and acrostics and riddle-solving of all kinds — it’s very cool that one of the core values of puzzle-solving is what saved the day: deductive reasoning.

Every crossword clue and riddle requires a certain mindset, where you get into sync with what the riddlemaster or puzzle creator was thinking, usually in a glorious a-ha moment. Seeing Ron and Ben do the same when all other puzzle skills failed was a testament to the puzzly tenacity and deductive reasoning that makes for a truly satisfying puzzle-solving experience.

As always, it’s a real treat to see puzzles incorporated into a narrative like this. Instead of a time-killer or a mere passing interest, they become linchpins of each story. The puzzles create conflict, drive epiphanies, and bring people together.

And in that spirit, I can’t think of a more perfect way to end this entry than this video clip, featuring the episode’s last few moments:

Not in so many words…

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A British reader and friend of the blog passed along this link to me this morning. It’s from the UK publication The Guardian, interviewing filmmaking Steve Simmons about his newest production, Crosswords.

The seven-minute short film takes us into the thoughts of a man puzzling out various crossword clues, even as he’s distracted by an attractive woman who shares his park bench.

Most of the clues are fairly straightforward instead of the more wordplay-based British cluing — “Not right (4)”, for example — but others could give you as much pause as the protagonist. (I admit, “The more you take, the more you leave behind (9)” had my gears turning.)

Seeing synonyms and red herrings pass before the solver’s eyes (and settling onto the screen) was a marvelous touch, reminiscent of some of the visual panache of BBC’s Sherlock.

The silent film style adds a touch of tongue-in-cheek flair and melodrama to the whole affair, making for a thoroughly enjoyable short.

Hmmm. Makes me wonder if PuzzleNation should get into the short film game. Exploring space with the intrepid crew of Starspell Command, or heading into dusty puzzle catacombs in search of treasure with the Crossword Raider…

On second thought, maybe I’ll leave it to pros like Simmons.

Finding the game IS the puzzle.

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Have you heard of Jason Rohrer, fellow puzzlefiends? If you haven’t, he’s a game designer with style and a keen eye for long-term planning. Specifically, a few thousand years in the future.

He masterminded A Game for Someone, the winning entrant in the “Humanity’s Last Game” challenge at this year’s Game Design Challenge. It’s a game he designed and tested with computers, so it’s never actually been played by human beings. He had the game pieces and board constructed out of titanium, and used specially chosen paper to record the rules.

Then he buried the game somewhere in the Nevada Desert.

Here’s where the puzzle aspect comes in.

He distributed lists with hundreds of potential GPS coordinates to various GDC attendees — one million possible coordinates in all — and left it in the hands of his audience.

From an article on Polygon.com:

He estimates that if one person visits a GPS location each day with a metal detector, the game will be unearthed sometime within the next million days — a little over 2,700 years.

Somehow, given the Internet’s penchant for crowdsourcing, I suspect it’ll be found a little sooner than that.

Let’s put a puzzler’s mind to the challenge.

You combine all of the lists of possible coordinates, and run them through a computer, which can organize them on a map based on location. Not only will this allow you to hit multiple coordinates nearby in one fell swoop, but it will help eliminate unlikely or impossible options (like anywhere easy digging isn’t so easy).

Then distribute your coordinated maps to a team of dedicated diggers — these delightful pups come to mind! — and get to work. A small army of geocachers could probably knock this out in a month or two.

Heck, if I wasn’t too busy trying to decipher the cryptic poem behind this treasure hunt, I might take a crack at Rohrer’s challenge myself.

Sudoku: Every number in its place.

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Sudoku puzzles are as ubiquitous as reality shows these days, and enthusiastic solvers can find puzzles of nearly any difficulty with ease.

Sudoku puzzles are usually ranked from one to five stars, with five star puzzles being the most difficult. Difficulty can depend not only on the number of starting digits, but their placement and the level of deduction involved.

Sudoku enthusiasts were the first to notice that the lowest number of clues required for a unique solution is 17. Puzzles with 16 clues invariably had alternate solutions.

For comparison purposes, the average newspaper sudoku has 25 set numbers. The sudoku puzzles on PuzzleNation vary in difficulty, but our easy puzzles range from 30 to 36 clues and our expert puzzles range from 25 to 30 clues, with medium and hard puzzles clue counts falling in between.

But the 17-clue threshold was all conjecture until a mathematician from University College Dublin named Gary McGuire put in the time (and the computer processing power) to write a mathematical proof confirming the suspicions of sudoku enthusiasts.

He designed a specific computer algorithm to process various sudoku grid patterns, allowing him to cut down on the computing time necessary to verify his conjecture. (Even with the reduced computing time, it took 7 million CPU hours in total, a monumental amount of processing time.)

From the nature.com article:

The idea behind this was to search for what he calls unavoidable sets, or arrangements of numbers within the completed puzzle that are interchangeable and so could result in multiple solutions. To prevent the unavoidable sets from causing multiple solutions, the clues must overlap, or ‘hit’, the unavoidable sets. Once the unavoidable sets are found, it is a much smaller—although still non-trivial—computing task to show that no 16-clue puzzle can hit them all.

Of course, as I said before, difficulty isn’t just about the number of clues. The puzzle widely regarded as the world’s hardest sudoku puzzle has 21 clues, but their placement makes for a much more mentally-taxing solving exercise.

I guess it just goes to show the old real estate cliche is true: it’s all about location, location, location.

Puzzles for the Eye

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I’m a huge fan of optical illusions and visual trickery. From trompe l’oeil paintings to the works of M.C. Escher, these pieces are sources of wonder, employing forced perspective and visual sleight-of-hand to create impossible objects and images with unexpected depth.

Essentially, they’re visual puzzles, left for you to sort out and examine at your leisure.

One of my favorites is also one of the simplest examples of multiple-perspective imagery: the Necker Cube.

As you can see, the Necker Cube appears to be in different configurations, depending on which part of the cube your eye interprets as facing you. By focusing on a different spot, the perspective shifts, and suddenly the cube is positioned differently.

There are numerous mindbending variations of the Necker Cube, some drawn as impossible figures, and others expanding on the illusion to further engage and disorient the viewer. Check this one out:

My eyes twitch a little just looking at it.

Usually, Necker Cube-style illusions have only two options, two perspectives between which they can shift. (Like in the old woman/young woman image that kicks off this post.)

But I recently discovered the following video, which features a three-dimensional image that can be viewed from three different perspectives:

It’s fascinating stuff, a perfect reminder that puzzles can be wordless and lurking in plain sight.

Check this out, mate.

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DIY puzzling is only limited by your imagination and inventiveness. After all, pencil and paper is all you need for most improvised puzzle games (hangman comes to mind, for instance).

But if you require a bit more inspiration for some down-home puzzling, look no further than a chess or checkerboard.

I’ve written about knight’s tours before, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to chess-based puzzles and brain-teasers.

You could challenge yourself with an Eight Queens puzzle. It sounds easy but it’s deceptively difficult. Place eight queens on a chessboard so that no queen is attacking (or capable of attacking) another.

This means that no queen shares a row, column, or diagonal with another queen.

There are only 12 distinct solutions, though each one can be rotated 90, 180, and 270 degrees, as well as mirrored on the board, leading to a much larger number of acceptable solutions. Numerous variations on this theme are available to test your wits and spacial reasoning, including placing 32 knights on the board without conflict, or nine queens and a pawn.

If that’s not your cup of tea, and you’ve got paper and scissors handy, you could whip up a quick game of pentominoes.

A pentominoes game consists of placing all of the above pieces into a given space without overlapping. You can play this on your own as a mental challenge, or add a bit of competition and strategy to it by alternating turns with other players and seeing who is the last person to place a piece on the board.

While you can use any size square or rectangle for your game board, a chessboard works well, especially since you can fit every piece on the board (leaving only a 2×2 space of uncovered squares). By setting or moving around this 2×2 space, you’ve instantly created a new challenge for yourself.

Personally, I’ve found them to be excellent palate cleansers after a few mentally-exhausting rounds of chess (though there are always variants on the game itself, like Pardu Ponnapalli’s TrimChess (image 2) and Jose Raul Capablanca’s expanded chess, if you’re looking for fresh ways to play.)

In any case, these are wonderful challenges with a minimum of set-up time, perfect for puzzlers looking for a new challenge without a lot of fuss. I hope you enjoy.