Sara Verrilli: Hi and welcome to this short talk by the MIT Game Lab on puzzles. My goal for this talk is to introduce a small set of the very many, many kinds of puzzles there are
Sara Verrilli: and provide a way to categorize and describe those puzzles. So the first thing you start with of course as well, "What is a puzzle?", as opposed to a game or a problem.
Sara Verrilli: Well, a puzzle is, a challenge to the solver to figure out the answer, be it by logic by insight or by creative thinking
Sara Verrilli: Classic puzzles try to challenge the thinking ability, the imagination and the ability of the solver to notice small clues, rather than the solver's knowledge of facts, although, as with almost everything, the more you know, the easier it is to get to a lot of answers.
Sara Verrilli: And in the very best puzzles, when you find the answer, it's obviously correct much the way a hand fits in the glove, the answer should fit the puzzle.
Sara Verrilli: Here we have one of the oldest types of puzzles in existence riddles. Riddles tend to pose a simple question usually filled with contradictions for the reader to solve.
Sara Verrilli: Riddles like to misdirect the reader by implying the answer lies in one area of one type or when it actually lies in another
Sara Verrilli: Take a moment, see if you can answer these riddles yourself. Now riddles are relatively simple. You make a guess. You either get it right or you don't. Many puzzles are much more complex involving multiple steps before you reach a final solution.
Sara Verrilli: These answers clearly fit and looking at the answer my response is, "Oh, of course!"" And that's the way the answer to a good puzzle ought to work.
Sara Verrilli: So thinking about what makes something a good puzzle. What kinds of puzzles are there. Well, besides riddles, obviously.
Sara Verrilli: There are honestly as many types of puzzles as there are puzzle designers and it's almost impossible to shoehorn a puzzle into just one category; usually a puzzle challenges the thinker in multiple ways. That said, there are some somewhat classic puzzle types that can help categorize them.
Sara Verrilli: Puzzles by definition are challenges to think in new and interesting ways. So almost always, you can find a different way to categorize a particular puzzle, if you're trying.
Sara Verrilli: Physical puzzles. These are logic puzzles and spatial reasoning puzzles, but the most important part is that they are physical: you don't solve them without moving pieces around and seeing what happens, usually in 3D.
Sara Verrilli: Rubik's cubes and all their variations are modern version, but pub puzzles, the mental rings in the center. The goal is to get that center ring off and then back on again.
Sara Verrilli: Pub puzzles have been around for centuries. Similarly, wooden 3D puzzles, that take a pile of sticks or balls.
Sara Verrilli: And then ask the solver to put them back in a interesting or unique configuration that once again, there's a big difference between a pile of sticks and a star or a pyramid nicely constructed
Sara Verrilli: Not all spatial puzzles are purely physical though. And yes, a jigsaw puzzle is clearly a physical puzzle.
Sara Verrilli: But it's not so much about manipulating things in 3D space as it is seeing in your mind's eye, how things fit together. Mazes trace a path or confusing set of lines and dead ends, matchstick puzzles ask you to move just one or two lines to make a completely different figure
Sara Verrilli: And the line drawing challenge is one where your goal is to draw the figure without ever moving your pencil from the paper without retracing any edges and without ever crossing your own path.
Sara Verrilli: This particular one was originally invented by Lewis Carroll, but there are a lot of other different shapes that ask the solver do very similar things.
Sara Verrilli: And I imagine everybody has seen a word puzzle, it's possibly one of the most common types of puzzles and it includes crosswords, word searches, rhebuses, anagrams, pretty much anything that asks you to play around with language and the definitions of words.
Sara Verrilli: On
Sara Verrilli: Big Bad Wolf is the example of a rhebus and dormitory, which you can respell as dirty room or if you just want someone to have to unscramble the letters and get a word.
Sara Verrilli: You can just mumble them up till you have, it's obviously not a word, is an anagram and I suspect everyone here has done a word search or crossword puzzle in class at least. English teachers tend to find them very useful for getting students encouraging students to practice their vocabulary.
Sara Verrilli: And because of the way they're built, they can really range in difficulty an awful lot.
Sara Verrilli: Now we come to my favorite type of puzzle, logic puzzles, and just like word puzzles, they're way more types of logic puzzles and being can be covered in a single talk much less one that is covering all kinds of puzzles.
Sara Verrilli: One of the most common or what we call knight and knave puzzles wherein the puzzler's challenge is to figure out who is lying and who is telling the truth, based on as little information as possible.
Sara Verrilli: Chest puzzles while they rely on knowing the rules of chess are another example. You've got a simple set of rules you know exactly how each of those pieces can move, which pieces do you move when and where in order to achieve the goal is set.
Sara Verrilli: Sodoku is another very common form of logic puzzle. It uses numbers, rather than words.
Sara Verrilli: But there are a set of very clear rules as to where you can or cannot place any of those numbers and there should be only one way to fill up those grids with the sets of numbers of one through nine.
Sara Verrilli: And finally, you may have seen these in school or you may see them elsewhere. There's the kind of classic clue puzzle where you are working your way through a set of clues and you're trying to figure out
Sara Verrilli: who did what, when, in what order with what color something what those what all those nouns get swapped in for varies, between puzzles but the grid approach and the series of clues are pretty consistent between them.
Sara Verrilli: Somewhat similar to logic puzzles but a very different beast is the lateral thinking puzzles. And yes, here I've got a couple of riddles again because riddles are perhaps one of the most common lateral thinking puzzles.
Sara Verrilli: Lateral thinking puzzles don't ask you to do logic, not the same way a logic puzzle does, A plus B plus C equals d
Sara Verrilli: Instead, they ask you to think sideways, to step outside of the box, to step out side of the line of logical thinking and find a very different way to answer the question.
Sara Verrilli: Tall tales, improbable stories with apparently convoluted but perfectly reasonable answers appear here. I've also added what I'd like to call sort of an eye twister a brain twister.
Sara Verrilli: Try saying the names of the colors, the color words are written in rather than reading what's written in English is your native language. It's going to be a little difficult.
Sara Verrilli: And just as a quick example. Here are the answers to these. All of these are fairly old and pretty commonly seen. So I hope I didn't spoil them for anyone.
Sara Verrilli: Now number puzzles, you could call them logic puzzles, you can call them math puzzles, you can call them pattern matching puzzles.
Sara Verrilli: For that matter, tanagrams, which are classic set of seven shapes used to be make many different outlines as a puzzle, is also a spatial puzzle.
Sara Verrilli: But because of the way you're trying to fit things together, it can be considered a member of the math category which is where I what I kind of call number puzzles.
Sara Verrilli: There's a pattern matching puzzle. The number sequence in the left top corner.
Sara Verrilli: Where you need to figure out what is the relationship or the algorithm that converts 3 into 18 and 5 into 50 and then prove you know it based converting 10 into something is an algebraic puzzle.
Sara Verrilli: Three unknowns, only one equation, but because those unknowns are you so reliably hopefully you can figure out what those unknowns are
Sara Verrilli: And obviously if it adds up correctly, you know, you've got the right answer.
Sara Verrilli: Ken Ken is both a math and a logic challenge. The goal is to fill the grid with numbers for a six by six grid. It's the numbers one through six only, with no number repeated in any row or column. So far, a little bit similar to Sudoku.
Sara Verrilli: But the numbers within a bolded shape add up to the specified number using the mathematical operation indicated. So in that top left-hand
Sara Verrilli: rectangle with an 11+ you need two integers that add up to 11. Well, obviously that's five and six.
Sara Verrilli: But now you have to figure out which square holds the five and which square holds the six and to do that you need to go figure out what the possible occupants of all the other rows and columns.
Sara Verrilli: Are, in the squares next to them.
Sara Verrilli: Does anybody remember Trivial Pursuit? Well, trivia puzzles, like to combine wordplay with cultural knowledge.
Sara Verrilli: Often using the names of famous people, lyrics from popular songs, names of movies, overall familiarity with them, names of characters.
Sara Verrilli: Many use anagrams or crossword style clues to challenge their players, but it is really helpful to solve these puzzles if you have the cultural knowledge in the area that it's working on movies, sports, songs, or what or whatever.
Sara Verrilli: If you don't have that cultural knowledge, you're going to have a very hard time solving them. Fortunately, nowadays we have the internet and that makes it a lot easier, I've found.
Sara Verrilli: And finally reached the place where puzzles and spies meet, cryptography. Cryptography is the art of hiding messages in plain sight. Usually using either a code or a cipher.
Sara Verrilli: A cipher uses an algorithm of some sort to transform a message into an apparently random string of symbols that make no sense.
Sara Verrilli: Morse code, despite being called a code, is actually a cipher turning letters into combinations of dots and dashes.
Sara Verrilli: A code, on the other hand, substitutes predefined symbols for each other. For example, if you want to encode the message steal the books, your code book might tell you to swap the word cook for steel and bacon for books. The message then becomes cook the bacon.
Sara Verrilli: Ciphers are more commonly used in puzzles, because once again, there's an algorithm there and where there's an algorithm, you can solve for it, but you could also have hints to clues that reveal what the code was to someone, so you can also imagine building a puzzle around a code.
Sara Verrilli: Here I have just a set of fairly common ciphers: Morse code, pig pen, and an old classic going back to Roman times, the Caesar Cipher. Caesar cipher is a simple letter substitution algorithm. And it depends on having a numerical key usually between one and 26.
Sara Verrilli: If your key is 19, for example, to encode an A you count 19 letters in the alphabet and write down a T
Sara Verrilli: So I've really, barely touched on the very wide variety of puzzles that exist and out there right now, someone is inventing a new puzzle that I can't imagine and knowing me, I probably can't solve but I'm going to give it a try. And you should too. Thanks for listening.
