Previously in this series.
Your father, the king, wishes to leave you and each of your siblings an identical but oddly-shaped parcel of land.
Your smartass academic grandfather cannot go ten minutes without giving you a life lesson in the form of a riddle. He corrects your childish outbursts didactically, but with kindness. You go by a diminutive of your name, Timmy or Betty or some other WASPy thing that was popular in the mid-20th century.
It is customary in your town to greet a new acquaintance by guessing the ages of his or her siblings.
You are at once amused and bewildered by your collection of matchsticks.
You live in either feudal Europe or Industrial Revolution-era London, but are not quite sure which.
You are at a dinner party with your spouse and two or more other heteronormative married couples. Your last names (both members of each couple have the same last name, of course) each begin with different, consecutive letters of the alphabet, starting with A.
You have a common if somewhat old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon first name and a reductive, slightly insulting alliterative nickname, such as Wasteful Wendy or Lazy Leonard.
You never experience delays in transit. After leaving your starting point, you travel at a consistent speed until you reach your destination.
Everybody you know has an occupation that can be described in one word. Baker. Teacher. Farmer. Prince.
You are a compulsive liar. You can’t help it; everyone in your family is one too, as is everyone in your town, and indeed, your entire nation. You border a nation where everybody tells the truth.
You were born on February 29th. That’s the trick.
You are traveling on foot with three uncaged animals of different species. Your presence is the only thing keeping them from killing each other.
You are at a dinner party with your spouse and three or more other heteronormative married couples. The table is just the right size for all of you. Nobody’s spouse is in his or her line of sight, and everyone likes it that way.
Just because you and your friends are bank robbers doesn’t mean you won’t go to elaborate lengths to ensure that everybody gets their fair share of stolen money.
You listen from the next room as your smartass academic grandfather patiently explains Roman numerals on a clock face to your younger sister (who will be half your age next year and two-thirds your age six years after that). A wave of sadness passes over you at the sudden realization that he will not be alive to share his wisdom with your children. Who ever heard of a smartass academic great-grandfather?
You flatly refuse to pass through any room more than once. This does not interfere with your work as a housekeeper or security guard.
You are a compulsive liar, but this has not stopped you from making friends with someone who never lies. You met at your job, where you are both customer service representatives at the entrance to your local archaeological wonder/mystery spot. People are always asking one of you how the other feels about things. It’s ridiculous, you think, like, what are you asking me for?
When building livestock pens, you arrange your animals first and then put up fences around them. No other method has ever occurred to you.
You are at a dinner party with your spouse and four or more heteronormative married couples. It transpires that you all have different types of pets, or different numbers of children, or you all went to different places on vacation last year. Possibly all three. You discuss this coincidence entirely in circumlocutions. It’s exhausting, frankly. Why can’t you just lay it all out?
You are a compulsive liar, and you live among truth-tellers and other compulsive liars. Visitors seem to trust the truth-tellers more, which has always struck you as odd, as talking to a liar generally reveals just as much as, and often more than, talking to a truth-teller. What does it even mean to say that you are a liar? If you lie literally all the time, couldn’t it be said that you and your people are just speaking a different language? You agree that cultural relativism is a thorny subject, but would argue that, given your nation’s lately increased visibility in the dominant social narrative, the incidence of misunderstandings is at an all-time low, which means you’re not really hurting anyone and anyway it’s not your fault you were raised only to lie.
Tags: books, diana walter, how to tell what novel you’re in, logic
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A+
I miss logic puzzles! I need to find a good book of them or something, my fifth grade teacher had us do them all the time!
I spend more time than I should doing them online. http://www.logic-puzzles.org/
Now I’m going to be spending more time than I should doing them online.
Nonexistent Deity That Is Def Still A Woman bless you
What with reading the Toast and doing online crossword puzzles, I have very little time to safeguard my Phillipe Patek watch from my daughter’s greedy mitts.
wow, now i’m going to do nothing but these forever
I saw this link three hours ago. I am popping back after three hours to say that this site has obliterated any productivity I had today.
I have several logic puzzle apps!
Welp there goes my productivity today.
I used to buy logic puzzle magazines periodically, but they got harder and harder to find (damn sudoku), so I finally got a year’s subscription. I think I might be set for life now, even after I gave a couple of them to my sister who turned out to also be a logic puzzle fan.
But the logic puzzle apps are pretty fun too.
If you’re looking for books with liars-and-truth-tellers-type puzzles, Raymond Smullyan has got you covered for the rest of your life.
The Riddle of Scheherazade was one of my favorites as a nerdy #teen. I’ve still got a bunch of post-its stuck in it and covered in notes.
All of the objects you own are black or white, and you consistently attempt to match them up with one another while in the dark.
Why would I leave all socks unpaired in a drawer and just pull one at a time out at random? Wouldn’t it make more sense to just pair them up?
I don’t pair up any of my socks! I leave them all in the drawer mixed, but instead of pulling one out at random when I want socks, I open the drawer and look inside and then when I see two socks that are the same I take them both out.
LOGIC: PUZZLED.
…yep, that’s pretty much my method, as well.
(Yes, I do live alone. Why do you ask? *cough*)
My wife and I have separate sock drawers.
FANCY.
Yeah, I knew I made the right choice, marrying a Rockefeller.
Well, sure, I had a separate sock drawer when I was married, too.
But now, I don’t have the pained-look-and-a-sigh every time she would see me putting clothes away after laundry. 🙂
I used to think this as a child in math class, but since I grew up and started doing my own laundry this is pretty much how I pick out socks of a morning. Only they stay in a basket usually, not in the drawer. I fail at adult!
You are someone in a position of power over many people, and have an exceedingly large collection of hats that are either black, red, or white. You enjoy tormenting the people under your control.
Oh my goodness, this is amazing. I used to do so many of these when I was little, but somehow completely forgot about them until right this minute.
Everybody you know has an occupation that can be described in one word. Baker. Teacher. Farmer. Prince.
In fact, everything you know about the world can be described using suspiciously few characters.
Also, you and your closest friends all have different occupations that begin with different letters of the alphabet. Blacksmiths never socialize with bakers in your town.
My favorite app of these is Logic Grid Puzzles. He just released a new pack!! I’m obsessed.
You are a pirate, but you are somehow sober enough to spend twenty minutes figuring out the precise amount of treasure to distribute to your crew to keep them from murdering you. Not today, you think, passing identical rations of gold coins among your fanatically logical fellows; not today.
I think that’s historically accurate though- pirate shares were very specific and could be in fractions.
I should mention that I’m not bad at logic puzzles but they make me angry- if I’m going to spend my precious brain time on something I want it to have a tangible benefit to someone. Doesn’t have to be me. For example, the Goosefeedfox puzzle is beloved by my family because it’s not a bad way of thinking about minivan logistics when there are three children.
Why do I even want to take this wolf across the river? Why can’t I just take the goat and the chicken, which are useful, and leave the damn wolf to fend for itself?
(It occurs to me that I may have mixed together two different versions of this puzzle. I don’t think goats eat chickens.)
because you are Ayla and have raised the wolf from cubhood in spontaneous, isolated discovery of domestication, and the wolf is loyal to you and will fetch and guard for you, rather like a modern dog that has had all of those traits bred into it after generations of selective breeding. It will not abandon you, unlike the lion, which you also raised from infancy, but which is a cat, and thus has no loyalty.
Fox, chicken, and chicken food, I think?
Also, fox, goose, and a bag of corn.
You are a young boy, and a man in a very dapper top hat keeps asking you questions and WHY DON’T I HAVE ENOUGH PICARATS
It’s alright, we can solve this problem. Would you like some tea?
In fact, I would! I would like some VERY SPECIFIC TEA. I hope you have the ingredients to make it on hand because if not you’ll have to solve more puzzles until you get them and then come back and find me. I’ll be here, waiting.
Logic-puzzles.org is one of my perennial go-tos for procrastination.
A archaeologist in a top hat is reminded of you by passing coincidences, the comments of strangers, or literally anything at all. He and his apprentice consider it a moral failing if they cannot discern your life story without hint( coin)s.
Everywhere you go, you meet professors of archaeology. Surely there can’t be enough jobs for all these archaeology professors.
I have an app on my phone so I can do logic puzzles. I find them very soothing when I’m stressed. I acknowledge that this is bizarre.
No it isn’t, though???
I don’t think it’s bizarre at all. At least people in logic puzzles behave predictably, even if their motivations are incomprehensible.
I Spirograph when stressed.
I do long division by hand. There can be no judging here.
FAVORITE HOW TO TELL YET! ALL HAIL THE AMUSING AND BEWILDERING COLLECTION OF MATCHSTICKS!
No, YOU keep a stack of logic puzzle books by your bed and do one or two of them before sleep every night even when it’s late and you’re tired.
Seriously, though, this is really great and would have made me follow you on Twitter if I didn’t already do so. Now I wonder if you are or have been a puzzle editor, or just a dedicated doer of logic problems. I worked for a puzzle publishing company for three months and I don’t regret leaving—it was one of the worst jobs I ever had—but I do regret that I never got to create or edit anything besides word searches and crosswords. Not that the company was doing a lot of logic puzzles anymore anyway. They’re a little hard to find these days, I think.
Oh my god I WISH I could be a puzzle editor. Or maybe not, based on your experience. (Also thank you!)
“Sir Mixalot likes big butts and he cannot lie. His brother does not like big butts and cannot tell the truth. You may ask one question…”
omg
[unseemly cackling]
ASK EACH MIXALOT BROTHER IF HE IS A TREE FROG
What would your brother say if I asked “Can your other brother deny that when a girl walks by with an itty-bitty waist and a round thing in his face, he gets SPRUNG?”
This is why I cannot get a PhD. My head hurts already. But I feel like you are very smart.
Can I sit by you? I once signed up for a logic course in college, so that I wouldn’t have to take statistics (which everyone I knew said was terrible and I’d hate it). I nearly failed out before half of the semester was over, switched to statistics, and rocked that shit right into an A+.
I have no love for logic puzzles, but I really admire those who can actually look at them and understand what they’re supposed to get out of them. Good for you, puzzlers.
I love logic puzzles and am generally quite good at them (judging by my LSAT score), but the one time I had to do formal logic in school (an IB philosophy course in high school), I definitely got a D on the final test. So either formal logic is horrible and I agree with you, or the concussion I had that week actually impacted my grade. In which case I still might agree with you.
I have a PhD and I hate hate hate hate hate logic puzzles. I was cackling with glee at how on point these are, but OMG, hate.
My mother loves logic puzzles and foisted them on us when we were younger, despite our burning hatred. I have never told her, though, that her foisting is probably why I did so well on that accursed section of the GRE.
I’ve pretty much blocked all memories of the GRE, which feels really nice at this point. Presumably I did ok on the logic section, because they let me into grad school, but…nothing.
Wait, I do remember picking an essay question. EFF YEAH HUMANITIES.
You had to give up planning dinner parties because all of your friends have long lists of extremely specific and arbitrary demands about who they will and will not sit next to, how far they are willing to sit from certain people, and which direction they would most like to be facing. It’s just not worth it anymore.
They never have it be dietary requirements. That’s a logic puzzle everyone who throws a dinner party has to solve: vegetarian but HOW vegetarian, allergic to peanuts but HOW allergic to peanuts, gluten free but HOW gluten free, kosher but HOW kosher, low oxalate diet but HOW low, no FODMAPS but WHICH FODMAPS.
(I care about your health, religious, and moral beliefs dear friends, I just want to know if I need to buy a new cutting board that I haven’t sliced bread on, whether you’re the kind of vegetarian that eats fish or chicken broth, and whether you’d be more comfortable bringing your own food. )
I tried making a food grid of each of my in-laws’ preferred and least-preferred foods, so I’d stop offering, to pick at random, coconut or red peppers to the people who would get sick just from the smell of those foods. It got too lengthy, so now I just make three big dishes for nine people, where the vegans get dibs on the vegan entree.
Can I butt in just for a moment to complain about how damn obnoxious it is when the twenty-seven carnivores all hone in on the dish meant for the three vegans, yelling, “THAT LOOKS GOOD I WILL TRY ME SOME OF THAT” and leave the giant pile of cooked animal untouched? Because we really shouldn’t have to specify that the vegans get dibs on the vegan entree.
To be honest, it really wouldn’t occur to me that there was a special vegan main dish, if I didn’t know any of the other party goers or their eating needs. I often don’t know people at parties, and if there’s an unlabeled buffet, I’ll just assume that everything’s equally available.
This is probably one reason I attend few parties to begin with.
I’ve always had major restrictions on what I can eat (I keep kosher, I’m lactose-intolerant, for a few years I was a strict vegetarian), and I have had many functions where I could only have very limited or not many options at all, so I think of reactions like this as being like the mildest form of privilege possible: it just doesn’t click that some people can only eat some things. At a big function, it’s more excusable not to think of it (though whoever is planning the menu really ought to!), but when at a dinner party or something like that, it’s just something to keep in mind. (My in-laws, for the record, are very good about making sure all the people with food restrictions always eat their fill first.)
I once was out for lunch with a dear friend, with whom I generally shared meals, but this time had gotten something she couldn’t eat: I took one too many vegetable rolls of hers, and she politely pointed out that she couldn’t have anything of mine in return. Since then, I have always kept it in mind, especially when I’m ordering food for a group or making goods for a bake sale or something: it is very much like a logic puzzle sometimes.
The 8-year old neighbor girl has a gluten allergy, and I’m trying to teach her little brother that this means he can’t have her gluten-free snacks, even if he finds them delicious, because he can eat everything else, and she can only eat the GF snacks. I don’t think he’s entirely clear on this concept.
Oh yes you may butt in, because this is terrible and it happened to me THIS WEEKEND. We were at a business function and had been asked to specify if we wanted a vegetarian meal in advance. There were three types of lunches provided (roast beef, turkey, and vegetarian). By the time I got to the sandwich place, there were no vegetarian lunches left. Clearly, people who had not specified they were vegetarian had snagged the vegetarian lunches. If there had not been attentive staffers on hand who managed to procure extra sandwiches, I would have not been able to eat lunch that day.
I used to LOVE THESE! I tried to find a book of them to use for Mental Comfort Food during a stressful time a while back and I couldn’t find any :/
Do you think people are GOOD at logic puzzles? Like, there’s a skill in there somewhere that people practice?
Or do people just get familiar with logic puzzles, and so when they see a new one, they’re able to see how it resembles puzzles they already know the answers to?
I think some people have a knack for them because of how their natural thought process is, but there is a skill in breaking out the separate components of the puzzle and piecing them together, just like mathematical word problems. My math teachers taught us how to do this. But I think that if people do them often enough they will start to notice certain patterns/trends and be able to use the same strategies/knowledge that they have from previous experience. Crossword puzzles are the same way – if you do them enough, you start to learn that certain words are popular with puzzle makers and get used to the kinds of clues and puns that certain puzzle makers use.
Every time I have correctly done a logic problem and impressed people with it, my secret has always been that it looked pretty much the same as a problem I already knew the answer to.
I tutor the LSAT, and there are definitely some people who are naturally better than others. That said, 90% of the skill can be taught within a few hours of tutoring (but needs probably 40-50 hours of studying for it to stick)
I was briefly an LSAT tutor, until it became apparent that simply getting a high score did not make me good at teaching others to do the same, and I agree with this.
Familiarity and practice are important. But those only work for people who are comfortable with verbal thinking. No amount of familiarity or practice will help if your brain strongly prefers images or motion. And if you have a learning disability related to language, forget about any fluency with these puzzles. Image/motion people and the learning disabled can learn to survive a logic test, but will need lots of time and will never excel.
Hm, I guess that’s true.
Though I think that’s also interesting, because that’s sort of also a slightly different skill from *solving* a logic problem, right? The problem really exists in three parts:
Identifying or decoding the problem
Establishing a methodology
Applying a methodology
And so, people who have an image or motion preferential brain aren’t necessarily going to have problems with steps two and three (though they might!), that doesn’t really matter if step one is going to be a continual barrier.
Hm.
I like your analysis. You said it better than I did. Thanks.
I do think there’s a skill set, sort of. There’s a book on problem-solving called How to Solve It, by George Polya, that I read in my teacher prep program, and I found it really interesting as a person who is good at logic puzzles and word problems and that sort of thing — I found that it did pretty much describe the way I’m thinking as I approach a problem, even though I’d never thought it out consciously. He lays out a process, actually pretty similar to what you suggested in your reply to RoseCamelia — understand the problem; devise a plan; carry out the plan; review/look back — and then goes into detail about the types of strategies/plans you might use to solve a problem, categories like “work backwards,” “draw a diagram,” “solve an equation”. Practice at solving different kinds of puzzles/problems is what allows you to choose the right strategy — that’s kind of what you’re saying about recognizing how it resembles a puzzle you’ve solved before — but you do have to have some skill built up at using that strategy, like, a problem that’s best tackled by writing and solving an equation will be a much bigger challenge if you’ve never taken an algebra class and don’t know how to solve equations.
Trust me, some people never learn how to make those connections, because spotting patterns and comparing data in unrelated situations appears to be a skill in its own right.
On a completely unrelated note: I’m sad that analogies aren’t part of the SATs anymore. They were my favorite part.
Your society has no mirrors and complicated rules about eye-colour
Also you have a large collection of assorted colored marbles. All you do with them is put them into a bag and try to guess which color will be pulled out next. You are kind of sad that this is what your life has amounted to.
Because of this you are increasingly familiar with binomial coefficients…
YES.
YES.
You are part of a band of refugees who cannot hope to reach safety until you provide a demanding stranger with exactly the right kind of pizza.
flEENS??
YOU’RE NOT FLEENS!!
…Whatever you are, MAKE ME A PIZZA.
More toppings!
SOMETHING ON THAT I DON’T LIKE!
(I still say this to my sister.)
Every few months I remember that I can’t figure out how to play Zoombinis on my computer, and get sad.
I spent over an hour once looking through some weird unsearchable website for a downloadable version I could play before I sadly gave up.
My daughter’s young man gave her an emulator for an older Mac to run on her more modern Mac and a copy of all the Zoombini games for Xmas last year. It was a masterful gift, and she let us all play it too.
I can ask him what he did, if you’d like?
FUCK, I’m back in the GRE!
Me too, cursing the testing gods who’d given me logic as the extra section. At that point I’d gladly have dredged up more algebra trig than solve another problem starting with “Tom only likes blue shoes…”
You and your four friends are incapable of arriving anywhere simultaneously, but instead show up at precise 15-minute intervals.
You really need a haircut but your local barber is preoccupied by a serious paradox. Also, where did you get all these apples?
God I love these so much and everyone always thought I was a weirdo for that but now I see so many other weirdos here and I am so happy
My traveling tradition is and always has been to pick up a book of logic puzzles at Hudson News (or variety puzzles, now, since they don’t sell the logic-only ones anymore) and do them on the plane, but when I get about halfway through the book I usually give up, so I have a collection of half-finished Penny Press books at home.
The lounge at The Toast Commune shall be stocked with logic puzzle magazines.
This is giving me very unpleasant flashbacks to the LSAT, which I did quite well on, and would have done extraordinarily well on if I’d gotten more than one answer correct in the entirety of the logic sections.
One. Question.
I realized that I would never be able to complete even *one* of those logic questions in the allotted time, and just penciled in “C” for all of them. (I assume I got at least a couple more points that way than if I’d actually tried).
MORAL: Trying is the first step towards failure.
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/nCOwlJ7Ngu4/hqdefault.jpg
You are sent to pick up lunches for your entire office, and you keep a record of what everyone wants with a small number of interdependent and self-referential notes (at least one person is never mentioned in any of these notes). If any two people want at least one similar thing to each other, your entire system breaks down and you curl into a ball on the floor, realizing too late that you have been making your notes with a pen.
That was actually part of my job when I was in grad school.
You and your four closest friends each have a different primary-colored telephone, the color names of which may or may not alliterate with your first names. Or something. (I’m trying to get in on this but logic puzzles make my palms sweat a bit, so my memories of them are hazy with anxiety.)
I love this. The first line reminded me of Terry Pratchett’s phrase for clumsily shoehorned exposition: “As you know, your father, the king…”
But the thing I thought I should share was this old Penny Arcade strip: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/02/13
Your town has far, far too many bridges. Also, you can only cross a bridge in one direction, and can never cross it again until you have crossed all the other bridges in town, because you and everyone else in town has OCD, or brain damage, or maybe it’s the law because the Bridgebuilders’ Guild has the City Council in its pocket. All you know is that you hate your life, and you avoid running errands as much as possible, and you really want to move someplace else entirely, but YOU CAN’T FIND THE BRIDGE THAT LEADS OUT OF TOWN
That sounds like when I tried to drive out of D.C. last summer.
The city government should really reform the bridge toll system already.
So THAT’S what happened with Milton Keynes.
When I helped my boyfriend study for the LSATs, I did the logic/analysis stuff in my head and told him the answer. We had to break up after that. Clearly.
it’s only logical
The nobility in your country enjoy building their castles with sets of three doors behind two of which are instant death. Apparently the law of attractive nuisance has not yet evolved in your common law system.
Logic Puzzles: Pure torture for arty kids in elementary school gifted-and-talented programs since at least the mid-80s look I don’t want to talk about it why did I even open that link to the online puzzles in another tab I’m just going to put my head down on my desk and cry until the teacher lets me go back to the reading corner okay.
TANGRAMS
Tangrams are an invention of Satan. Every single person I went to school with thrills at the thought of the damned things; clearly they are delusional.
After sweating over the logic puzzles in the LSAT years ago, I was quite relieved to find that (as an actual, practicing attorney) I’ve never had to divide people up into six volleyball teams so that everyone gets a turn.
Isn’t that what your secretary is for? (Said with love, as a legal secretary.)
I’m not a fancy enough lawyer to have one of those- I had to learn to work the fax machine myself!
I, on the other hand, wished the entire LSAT were logic puzzles. Maybe this is why I’m not a practicing attorney after law school.
You are a prisoner. Your prison guards are sadistic bastards. No, they don’t beat you or lock you in solitary or anything so mundane. Instead, they have you line up and wear hats, or take turns going into a room and flip switches, or decide whether or not to snitch on each other. Eventually, fed up with the whole business, you escape through the cell doors, each of which opens and closes depending on the state of the other doors. But, alas, you arrive at a new conundrum–you have but one boat, too small to carry all of you, and some of your fellow prisoners are very slow rowers, and also some of them will eat each other if left alone. By the time you figure out how to get everyone across the river in time, the guards arrive and take you back to your cells.
If that worked, you’d be the Rats of NIMH.
“You never experience delays in transit. After leaving your starting point, you travel at a consistent speed until you reach your destination.”
I would murder the next three people I see if this could be true.
You can three people – one to each side, and another across the table, but you have to get them to swap seats with their nearest neighbour until the right people are sitting around you.
You are one of an even number of people seated around a large circular table.
There are people at this dinner party that you refuse to be seated next to, and for some reason that’s socially acceptable.
“You are traveling on foot with three uncaged animals of different species. Your presence is the only thing keeping them from killing each other.”
If you change species to breeds, this is me walking my parents’ dogs.
Holy crap dude HEY.
Yes, it is I, Kickpuncher, awoken from my slumber!
(hello, fellow scottie, congrats on your first toast post!!)
Several more from a professional:
– You are logically infallible, capable of deducing anything deducible – no matter how complex – in minutes. And so is everyone else. And you all know this about yourselves and each other.
– You are seated in a chair. You see a line of people seated in chairs in front of you, all facing the same way you are. Everyone is wearing a hat.
– You are in a labyrinth. Every time you take a step, the mechanical minotaur takes two.
– Monty Hall has generously revealed that one of the doors you didn’t choose was hiding a Zonk, and is asking you if you’d like to switch.
– For NO ONE can undo the treachery you have inflicted upon the land!
And some lateral thinking bonuses:
– You lead a gateman to a magic mirror, who turns into a little card reading “HELLO, my name is…”.
– You are in a room with no doors or windows. Maybe you’re dead, hanging over a pool of water or lying beside a glowing green rock. Or maybe you saw a table, and are hoping no one notices the ‘w’ when you put the two halves back together for your escape attempt. How you ever got inside is apparently irrelevant.
– You didn’t see the sawdust. You are dead.
THE POOL OF WATER ONE. That came up in 4th grade. It’s from “Stories with Holes,” right? Somewhere on the list after “The man was afraid to go home because the man with the mask was there” and the thing about the albatross?
There are several written sources for these sorts of problems – I have a trilogy of books from the early 90s by one Paul Sloane – but generally the spreading of lateral thinking problems is an oral tradition. I *was told*, as opposed to read, all those I referenced except the nametag one (which comes from a very famous puzzle in GAMES Magazine back when it was a *good* publication).
“You rub your hands together until they are sore. You take the saw and cut the table in half.”
Just thought of a new one:
– People can see and/or light can shine only due north, east, west, and south, and no other directions.
Ooh, I liked this a lot despite a lifelong comprehension block with logic probs. I did work, glacially, at sudoku until I could solve a medium-hard one, but “Rose buys petunias on Tuesday while Daisy cooks mashed potatoes at the Finer Diner, so who is Dahlia’s best friend?” gives me the feeling that I’m suffering a cerebral blowout. Any suggestions for how to gently nudge at these would be great, because I actually want to like them, but feeling like a dingbat slows me down.
Those who naturally think in grid format do better with these puzzles. Know anyone who loves spreadsheets? (ahem) Those people love logic puzzles. More normal people, like you, can conquer them by consciously organizing the details into a grid in your head. Or on paper.
The grid is part of what throws me off. I tried one just after reading this piece and when the computer checked my work, ha ha ha ha. No. Yet my mother, who was not in the least spreadsheety by nature, would blithely check things off and Boom! The questioner is his own grandpa! Or what the hell ever. Gaaarrgh. #mologicmoproblems
I stare at them in blank horror. My brain freezes and I can’t even conceptualize how to begin the process of solving the puzzle. I just read them for the mildly entertaining scenarios, and hope to god no busybody actually wants me to solve them.
Well, I’m letting you off the hook as far as coaching me goes, but I’m still gonna try again.
I wonder if part of the problem might not be just the wordiness of them? I love logic puzzles – the grid ones, anyway, I’m sort of terrible at others – and I also really loved word problems in math class when I was a child. Meanwhile, I hate sudoku because it’s all just boring, boring numbers.
But if you can break everything down with the grids, I think it makes it easier. And taking it piece by piece. You know four things with your example: Rose buys petunias and she buys them on Tuesdays. Daisy cooks mashed potatoes and she cooks them at the diner. And then come back to Dahlia later because she needs to just make up her damn mind already and quit being so coy about who her best friend is.
Yeah, Dahlia has problems. She needs to stop making them my problem. And you’re right–sudoku initially confused me because numbers, THEN it confused me because logic, but finally I got that it’s just nine of one and a half dozen and a half of another and all was well. Introducing a human and a shirt color into that makes me actually want to cry. But I still *really* want to improve, at these and lateral thinkers both. The surgeon is a woman for heaven’s sake. When will I ever learn…
“[Sudoku]’s just nine of one and a half dozen and a half of another” XD May I quote you on that?
I’ve written a few of the grid ones about my friends. I like writing them far more than I like solving them.
IMPRESSED
I’m not sure this series can get better than this post right here.
My mom does sudoku in pen. That is all.
The hotels you attend always forget which key belongs to you – and to all other guests.
Well, I'm letting you off the hook as far as coaching me goes, but I'm still gonna try again.
There’s a cabbage involved. Raising the question: is cabbage so expensive/scarce on the opposite river bank that you cannot risk losing a single head of it on the journey? Raising the question: why are you bothering with these damn animals at all when you could be the Cabbage Export King instead?
(ETA: Dangit this is in response to Elsajeni re: the wolf/goat/river puzzle and I can’t get my comment to nest properly)
There's a cabbage involved. Raising the question: is cabbage so expensive/scarce on the opposite river bank that you cannot risk losing a single head of it on the journey? Raising the question: why are you bothering with these damn animals at all when you could be the Cabbage Export King instead?
(ETA: Dangit this is in response to Elsajeni re: the wolf/goat/river puzzle and I can't get my comment to nest properly)
My daughter's young man gave her an emulator for an older Mac to run on her more modern Mac and a copy of all the Zoombini games for Xmas last year. It was a masterful gift, and she let us all play it too.
I can ask him what he did, if you'd like?
If that worked, you'd be the Rats of NIMH.
If Suzy’s birthday is on a Monday and yours is on a Friday, what month does the Queen select subjects to bake cakes for one-third of England and a quarter of Italy, while NASCAR races in two different states, one being Texas. What is the other one and what date would NASA launch the satellite for the space station while orbiting around Mars in 2024, and when would that not be the case? ANSWER of course is August 26 and never on a Tuesday in the state of Oregon and only if your friend lives in Australia during the wet season and definitely not in the dry season. SIMPLE!