Puzzle
| I | INTRODUCTION |
Puzzle, problem designed as a mental challenge. Solving a puzzle often provides a rewarding experience, helping the solver to think in a new way. Puzzles may be distinguished from games, a broad class of competitive activities primarily directed at amusement. Some games, such as roulette and other games of chance, may require little or no ingenuity. A puzzle, however, either is constructed intentionally or is used to perplex and to stimulate thinking of potential solutions. Nevertheless, some classic games—such as solitaire, go, chess, and checkers—include numerous puzzles.The broad appeal of many types of puzzles is demonstrated by crossword puzzles, which appear daily in nearly every newspaper around the world; jigsaw puzzles, which are enjoyed by youngsters and the elderly alike; and mechanical puzzles, such as the Rubik's Cube, which sold 200 million units in the early 1980s.
| II | HISTORY |
Humans have always been fascinated by puzzles, perhaps as a reflection of a natural tendency toward curiosity. The earliest evidence of puzzles dates to the 2nd millennium bc in the Middle East. Oral puzzles are probably as old as human language, but the earliest known written puzzle, a riddle inscribed on a tablet, dates to Babylonian times (beginning about 2000 bc). Riddles are found in many ancient documents, including the Bible, the Qur'an (Koran), those from Greek mythology, and Sanskrit manuscripts. The earliest known physical puzzle is the huge labyrinth constructed by Pharaoh Amenemhet III in the vicinity of Lake Moeris, Egypt. It dates to the 19th century bc and was described by ancient Greek historian Herodotus in his 5th-century-bc writings. Mathematical puzzles are believed to have originated with the development of arithmetic in Egypt and Babylonia during the 3rd and 2nd millennia bc.During the Middle Ages (5th century to 15th century) there was interest in mathematical puzzles, as well as puzzle-vessels (jugs or mugs with hidden tubes) and mazes. A text of 56 mathematical puzzles, Propositiones ad Acuendos Juvenes (Problems to Sharpen the Young), was written by 9th-century English scholar Alcuin. In the same century Muhammad ibn Mūsá ibn Shākir, of Baghdād (now in Iraq), described 100 pneumatic and mechanically operated puzzle-vessels and trick-vessels in Kitāb al-hiyal (The Book of Ingenious Devices, translated in 1979). During the 12th century many of the churches constructed in France and Italy incorporated labyrinths within decorative floor patterns.
During the last half of the 19th century, many types of puzzles were designed and published by Sam Loyd, from the United States, and Henry Dudeney, from Britain, each of whom is considered the greatest puzzle inventor of his respective country. Many of the puzzles of Loyd and Dudeney were popularized by American writer Martin Gardner in his Scientific American magazine columns (December 1956 through June 1986) and his many books.
| III | TYPES OF PUZZLES |
Puzzles can be grouped into three broad classes: riddles and word puzzles, mathematical and logic puzzles, and physical and mechanical puzzles.
| A | Riddles and Word Puzzles |
| 1 | Riddles and Conundrums |
Riddles, difficult or confusing questions presented as problems to be solved, are believed to be the earliest puzzles. In antiquity, riddles were often taken quite seriously. In Greek mythology, for example, legendary hero Oedipus solved the riddle of the sphinx at the peril of his own life. According to tradition, certain ancient authors believed that the death of ancient Greek poet Homer was precipitated by distress at his failure to solve a riddle posed to him by fishermen: “What we caught, we threw away: what we could not catch, we kept.” The answer: “Fleas.”A conundrum is a riddle with a solution that relies on a word pun. The conundrum “What is black and white and red all over?” uses puns on red and all over to yield the solution: “A newspaper.”
| 2 | Word Puzzles |
Rebuses use words, pictures, or symbols to visually represent sounds that resemble the intended words of the solution. The rebus below, for example, is solved by relating the spatial positions of the words:
Anagrams (Greek for “reversed letters”) involve rearranging letters of words or phrases to form new words or phrases. In the 3rd century bc, Greek poet Lycophron made a profession of devising anagrams on the names of members of the court of Hellenistic King Ptolemy II. Nineteenth-century British mathematician Charles Dodgson, better known as author Lewis Carroll, created the following anagram from the name of British humanitarian Florence Nightingale: “Flit on, cheering angel.”
A word-square puzzle comprises a grid of apparently random letters that actually contains hidden words. One of the earliest examples, from the 3rd century, is a square array of 1521 Greek letters, aligned 39 across and 39 down, carved in alabaster by Egyptian sculptor Moschion.
Acrostic puzzles take the first letter from the first word in each line of a verse or group of words and use these first letters to form a word. A double acrostic uses the last letter of each line to form an extra word. The early Christians used the fish as a symbol, which may be viewed as a derivative of an acrostic formed with the first letter of the Greek words for Jesus Christ, God's Son, and Savior, respectively, to spell the Greek word for fish.
Charades (derived from charado, Portuguese for “entertainment”) are word riddles solved one syllable at a time. The syllables of the answer are found by solving a series of puzzle clues. For example: “My first is a vehicle, my second is a favorite, and my whole is in most drawing rooms.” The answer: “Carpet.”
In a crossword puzzle, words are guessed from clues and are fitted to an interlocking grid of horizontal and vertical squares. The crossword puzzle was invented by American Arthur Wynne in 1913 and was published in the New York World newspaper. By 1924 crossword puzzles had grown into a national pastime in the United States. That year, American publishing company Simon and Schuster printed the first book of crossword puzzles, which sold about 500,000 copies.
Visual puzzles involve searching a picture to find hidden or disguised figures or answering a question about some part of a visual illusion. For instance, the popular 19th-century prints of American lithographic company Currier & Ives featured hidden people, animals, and other objects. A 16th-century painting from Bukhara, Uzbekistan, of a camel includes hidden figures of 17 people, 10 rabbits, a monkey, and a dragon (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City).
| B | Mathematical Puzzles and Logic Puzzles |
While most fields of mathematics have created puzzles for both academic study and recreational use, recreational puzzles have also led to important developments in mathematics. The fields of topology and graph theory have their origins in the analysis of a popular puzzle by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. The puzzle is to find a path over the seven bridges of Königsberg, Germany, without traveling over the same bridge twice. Similar to mathematical puzzles are logic puzzles—puzzles that require deductive reasoning with little or no numerical calculation.
| 1 | Mathematical Puzzles |
Some of the first number puzzles were included in an important ancient Egyptian mathematical document composed about 1650 bc and known as the Rhind Papyrus. Magic squares, another early form of number puzzle, originated in China before the end of the 1st century. A magic square puzzle forms a square array of numbers so that the rows, columns, and major diagonals all have equal sums.
In 1924 Henry Dudeney published a popular number puzzle of the type known as a cryptarithm, in which letters are replaced with numbers. Dudeney's puzzle reads: SEND + MORE = MONEY. Cryptarithms are solved by deducing numerical values from the mathematical relationships indicated by the letter arrangements. The only solution to Dudeney's problem: 9567 + 1085 = 10,652.
Geometric puzzles were studied by Greek mathematician Archimedes in the 3rd century bc, although it is not known whether he also designed the puzzles. The Loculus of Archimedes is a dissection puzzle in which a square is cut into 14 pieces that are to be reassembled (a type of put-together puzzle) to form silhouettes of people, animals, or objects. In 1902 Dudeney published another type of geometric puzzle: Cut an equilateral (equal-sided) triangle into four pieces that can be reassembled into a square.
Logic puzzles and paradoxes were part of the study of logic in the 4th century bc by Greek philosophers, including Aristotle. Zeno of Elea wrote famous paradoxes that attempted to prove that apparently obvious sensory experiences, such as the perception of motion, are in fact impossible. In the 19th century Lewis Carroll popularized several logic puzzles in storybooks such as A Tangled Tale (1880).
One of the first computer puzzles originated in the mid-1970s as the computer program Adventure, an interactive series of written puzzles created by American computer programmers Willie Crowther and Don Woods and distributed on the computer network ARPANET, the predecessor to today's Internet. The program's success led to a computer series titled Zork, a text-only story with puzzles that sold more than 1 million copies (see Electronic Games: Computer Games).
| C | Physical and Mechanical Puzzles |
| 1 | Labyrinths and Mazes |
Labyrinths and mazes in life-size structures provide collective amusement in Japan and many other parts of the world. More common are books of mazes designed to be solved by drawing a line from a starting point to an ending point without crossing various obstacles. Also popular are hand-held dexterity mazes, in which objects—usually small balls—are manipulated in a small maze structure.
| 2 | Mechanical Puzzles |
Put-together puzzles begin with several components that require a unique method of assembly or combination. An early example is the Loculus of Archimedes, also called Stomachion. In jigsaw puzzles, flat interlocking cut-out pieces form a picture or figure when properly assembled. These puzzles were invented by British mapmaker John Spilsbury about 1760 as an educational toy. In the Chinese Tangram, prevalent since about 1800, seven regular geometric pieces cut from a single square are used to form hundreds of silhouettes of people, animals, and objects.
Take-apart puzzles are mechanical puzzles that require opening a device, finding a secret compartment, or disassembling an object. As early as the 17th century, trick-locks or puzzle-locks incorporated hidden keyholes to thwart thieves. In the late 19th century, Native American women used decorated puzzle purses with a hidden compartment to protect their money and gambling dice.
The challenge of interlocking puzzles is found both in taking them apart and in putting them back together. Beginning about 1800, popular puzzle shapes such as wooden-cross puzzles and burr puzzles (originally named for their resemblance to seed burrs) were sold by the German toy company Bestelmeier. Since 1970, hundreds of interlocking puzzle designs in the shape of polyhedrons, three-dimensional geometrical objects, have appeared on the market.
Disentanglement puzzles require the removal of trapped parts from loops or other assemblies. Some of the earliest disentanglement puzzles, made of string, were described in Italian mathematician Jerome Cardan's publication De Rerum Varietate (1557). A difficult mother-of-pearl string puzzle known as Solomon's Seal was owned by 18th-century American patriot John Hancock.
Sequential-movement puzzles involve the maneuvering of puzzle parts, and they usually require a large number of steps, executed according to prescribed rules, to reach a goal. This diverse class includes puzzles such as peg solitaire, described by German mathematician G. W. Leibniz about 1600; Chinese rings, described by Cardan in 1550; sliding-piece puzzles such as the one known as the 14/15 Puzzle in the 1880s; and the Rubik's Cube of the early 1980s. In peg solitaire, a player tries to remove all but one of the pegs by jumping one peg over another and removing the jumped peg. The Chinese Rings puzzle consists of a series of linked rings (usually five to ten) encircling a hairpin-shaped double-bar. The object of the puzzle is to free all the rings from the double-bar. The 14/15 Puzzle is made up of 15 consecutively numbered sliding blocks, all placed in a square tray large enough to hold 16 blocks. After the pieces are scrambled, the solver tries to reorder them. The Rubik's Cube is a three-dimensional extension of the same puzzle. Initially each of the six sides of a Rubik's Cube is a different solid color. The colors of the cube faces can be scrambled by twisting various sections of the cube around any of its three axes. The challenge is to restore a scrambled cube to its original configuration.
Another type of sequential-movement puzzle is the river-crossing puzzle, first described by Alcuin in one of his 9th-century texts. The puzzle presents a farmer who has to transport a goat, a wolf, and some cabbages across a river in a boat that will only hold the farmer and one of the cargo items. In this scenario, the cabbages will be eaten by the goat, and the goat will be eaten by the wolf, if left together unattended. Solutions to river-crossing puzzles usually involve multiple trips with certain items brought back and forth between the riverbanks.
Dexterity puzzles are mechanical puzzles that depend—or seem to depend—upon hand-eye coordination, though logical techniques are often required to solve them. Dexterity puzzles known as throwing-and-catching puzzles have been found to have existed in cultures from ancient Greece to pre-Columbian (before 1492) South America and Alaska. Rolling-ball puzzles, in which the object is to roll a ball into a cut-out by manipulation, became highly popular in the United States in 1889, when a circular wood and cardboard puzzle named Pigs in Clover was first produced by American toymaker Charles Crandall.
Puzzle jugs and mugs, types of trick-vessels or puzzle-vessels, are a challenge to drink from without spilling the contents through numerous holes. The secret is to find and use built-in hidden tubes as straws to suck out the liquid. Puzzle vessels of several types were in use as early as 1000 bc in Greece and the Middle East.
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
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