puzzle

puzzle, a problem that may take many forms, including games and toys, and is solved through knowledge, ingenuity, or other skills. The solver of a puzzle must arrive at the correct answer, or answers, by thinking or putting pieces together in a logical way. There are different genres of puzzles, from word puzzles such as crosswords and number puzzles to mechanical puzzles such as the Rubik’s Cube. Puzzles often serve as a method of keeping one’s mind active and as a pastime, as seen by their prevalence in daily newspapers and online, but they are also at the centre of fiercely contested global competitions such as the World Puzzle Championship.

A history of puzzles

The word puzzle first appeared in print in 1599 in the play The Two Angry Women of Abington by Henry Porter, who used it to describe a state or condition of bewilderment. In its meaning of “a difficult problem or question,” puzzle first makes an appearance in An Antidote Against Atheism, a book by Henry More that was published in 1652. It was not until 1781 that the word puzzle took on the sense of “something devised for the purpose of testing one’s ingenuity,” which is how it was used in James Woodforde’s The Diary of a Country Parson. But puzzles in varying shapes and forms, while not always called puzzles, have shown up throughout history.

Among the earliest documented references to puzzles is one in the Rhind papyrus, compiled by a scribe called Ahmes about 1650 bce. (Its name is derived from the Scottish antiquarian Alexander Henry Rhind, who purchased it in 1858.) The papyrus contains 84 mathematical problems, divided into arithmetic, geometry, and miscellaneous, and it was at its heart a mathematics textbook written in a manner encouraging readers to develop the necessary techniques themselves. According to legend, the ancient city of Thebes in Greece was the home of a sphinx, a creature with the head of a woman and the body of a lion who killed people wishing to enter Thebes. But, to give her victims a chance, she would first pose them a riddle. If they failed to answer it, they were killed. Nobody solved the riddle until Oedipus came along and answered “What goes in the morning upon four feet, in the afternoon upon two feet, and in the evening on three feet?” with the correct response: humankind.

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In ancient times puzzles were part of everyday life and stories. The Stomachion puzzle, also called Archimedes’ Box, was a dissection puzzle with a square divided into 14 pieces. It challenged readers to make as many different arrangements as possible. Thanks to computational geometry, it is now known that there are 17,152 solutions. Archimedes’ Box is considered the first recorded tangram, a very popular contemporary puzzle, though it differed in having 14 pieces instead of the 7 pieces of a contemporary tangram. Alexander the Great is known for solving the Gordian knot in 333 bce, when he reached the capital of Phrygia during his conquests. The Gordian knot—now a term for a problem solvable only by bold action—was considered unbeatable until Alexander cut through it with his sword (or, perhaps, removed the pole to which the knot was tied) rather than figuring out how to untie it. The ancient Romans had puzzle locks with secret levers.

Drawings and descriptions of labyrinths and mazes were present in ancient Greece and Rome, the most famous being the mythical Cretan labyrinth constructed by Daedalus. The Cretan labyrinth, known from the legend of the Minotaur, also gave rise to a word important to many modern-day puzzles: clue. This labyrinth was traversed by Theseus with the help of a ball of thread given him by the Cretan princess Ariadne. Clew, meaning ball of thread, evolved into clue.

Alcuin (732–804 ce), a scholar and reformer in the development of Roman Catholicism in western Europe who acted as an adviser to the court of Charlemagne, is known for his puzzles. Several copies of his Propositiones ad acuendos iuvenes (“Propositions to Sharpen the Young”) have been found; they include 56 problems. The tone is very playful, and some of the problems have been found to date to earlier times, suggesting that Alcuin was a puzzle collector. Some of his puzzles are classic river-crossing problems (a type of puzzle that remains popular today), such as:

A man must take a cabbage, a goat, and a wolf across the river in a boat, but the boat can only hold two of them at one time. How can he bring them all to the other side in good condition? How can he do this without leaving the wolf alone with the goat (as it might eat the goat), or the goat alone with the cabbages (as it might eat them)?

The development of puzzles in Europe then stagnated for almost 400 years, as Roman numerals were not well suited for doing calculations, and Arabic numerals had not yet reached the Western world. This changed with the book Liber abaci written by Leonardo of Pisa, more popularly known as Fibonacci. Through his book Fibonacci helped introduce Arabic numerals to Europe. He used math and logic problems in terms that his readers could relate to. In recognition of his work introducing mathematical concepts to its people, the republic of Pisa gave him a salary in 1240.

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The printing press enhanced the spread of puzzles, and some early collections became very popular. In 1612 the French scholar Claude-Gaspar Bachet de Méziriac published a collection of puzzles called Problemes plaisans et delectables qui se font par les nombres (“Pleasant and Delectable Problems That Are Done by Numbers”), which includes numerous think-of-a-number tricks among other problems. Many of these puzzles and their variations have remained popular over time. Another collection, by Henry van Etten and largely based on Bachet’s work, first appeared in French in 1624 and then in English in 1633, and it contained mathematical and scientific tricks. (Incidentally, the book is also known for coining the word thermometer.) Recreational mathematics had started growing in popularity, and even Isaac Newton is known to have expressed some of his ideas in puzzle format. Of course, puzzles continued hand in hand with the field of mathematics, a famous instance being the Königsberg bridge problem, set in the old Prussian city of Königsberg. The city had seven bridges, and the question arose of whether a citizen could walk through the town in such a way as to cross each bridge exactly once. In a famous solution that led to the development of graph theory and topology, the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler proved in 1735 that such a walk was impossible.

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Recreational puzzles entered a new dimension in 1766, when John Spilsbury, a British cartographer and engraver, invented the first jigsaw puzzle. Spilsbury pasted a map of the world onto wood and then cut the wood into pieces, with the aim of teaching geography to children. These puzzles thus originated as educational devices using maps and expanded into subjects such as history, alphabets, botany, and zoology. The use of popular pictures in puzzles began in the 1860s and ’70s in both Great Britain and the United States.

With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, people’s leisure time increased, creating a demand for more puzzles. (Sports also surged in popularity about this time.) The Ladies’ Diary; or, The Woman’s Almanack, an annual publication which ran from 1704 to 1841, covered mathematical puzzles as a major feature. Early riddles were set by its first editor, John Tipper, and readers wrote in with mathematical puzzles. These puzzles were known for their difficulty, with the almanac seeking to keep its readers engaged until the next year’s edition was printed.

The Tower of Hanoi puzzle (also called the Tower of Brahma) is widely believed to have been invented in 1883 by the French mathematician Édouard Lucas, though his role in its invention has been disputed. It is associated with a legend of a Vietnamese or Indian temple where the puzzle was supposedly used to increase the mental discipline of young priests. In the legend, the young priests were given 64 gold disks stacked neatly on one of three posts. The objective of the puzzle was to move the entire stack to another rod, obeying a set of simple rules: only one disk could be moved at a time; each move could consist of taking the upper disk from one of the stacks and placing it on top of another stack or on an empty rod; and, finally, no larger disk could be placed on top of a smaller disk.

In the 19th century the British mathematician and author Lewis Carroll published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, both of which include a great deal of logical teasing and wordplay. But his Pillow Tales and A Tangled Tale are known for their collections of puzzles, the latter presenting the puzzles as part of imaginative story lines. Carroll also invented a large number of word puzzles, of which the word ladder is the most popular. The premise of the word ladder is to turn one word into another of the same length by changing one letter at a time without altering the order of the others, each change creating a legitimate English word. For example, turn ARMY into NAVY with eight letter changes.

Lewis Carroll wasn’t the only author to use riddles and teasers in books. In The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien has Gollum and Bilbo engage in a game of riddles with Bilbo’s life at stake. Jane Austen has the eponymous hero of Emma answering a riddle posed by Mr. Elton. Harry Potter answers a riddle posed by a sphinx in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. In Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot, the titular princess sets her suitors three riddles with the condition that if they get them wrong, their heads will be lopped off. William Shakespeare resorted to riddles as well, with Portia’s father devising a riddle that her suitors must solve to win her hand in marriage in The Merchant of Venice. Jorge Luis Borges, in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” has Stephen Albert using a riddle to explain a labyrinth. In the world of graphic novels, the archvillain Riddler keeps the Batman on his toes by constantly posing riddles to the Caped Crusader.

Henry Ernest Dudeney was a mathematician who supplemented his income as a clerk in the civil service by selling ingenious puzzle compositions to magazines and newspapers. In 1907 he published his collection The Canterbury Puzzles, a tale of a group of travelers who set their companions problems while on their way to Canterbury. He followed this with Amusements in Mathematics in 1917. Dudeney formed an alliance with the American Sam Loyd, and they produced numerous teasers together, Dudeney providing commentary on Loyd’s puzzles using the pseudonym “The Sphinx.” Loyd was known for the extraordinary range and volume of puzzles he published but was equally infamous for not acknowledging the origin of many of the puzzles he published. This led to Dudeney and Loyd falling out. One puzzle promoted by Loyd (which, despite his claims, he did not invent) was the 15-Puzzle, which consisted of a four-by-four square containing 15 blocks numbered from 1 to 15 and one empty square into which neighbouring blocks could be slid. The numbers start jumbled, and the solver’s aim is to restore them to the right order. The 15-Puzzle is very popular now, though with pictures replacing the numbers.

Loyd was also considered a pioneer in composing modern chess problems. (In chess the word puzzle is almost never used, problem being preferred instead.) Early chess problems were portrayed as demonstrations of triumphs against apparently insurmountable odds. In Arabic and Persian such problems were known as manṣūbāt, meaning “arrangement” or “position.” Loyd popularized this genre through many creative puzzles.

Dudeney also dabbled in word puzzles, one of which was the word square. He came up with plenty of word squares, which have a square of letters that can be read either along the rows or along the columns. Crosswords of an elementary kind were apparently derived from the word square in England in the 19th century. In the United States the puzzle developed into a serious adult pastime. The first modern crossword puzzle was published on December 21, 1913, under the name Word-Cross on the Fun page of the comics section of the New York World newspaper. Arthur Wynne, credited with the idea, came up with a diamond-shaped grid of interlocking across and down words. A few weeks later the name changed from Word-Cross to Crossword, apparently thanks to a typesetting error. The name caught on and remains to this day. In Britain, Pearson’s Magazine became the first to print a crossword in February 1922, and in 1924 the Sunday Express became the first newspaper to do so. The first book of crosswords was published the same year. Cryptic crosswords were introduced in Britain in 1925, but America continued with straight (or what we now call direct or quick) clues, with a straightforward clue to each answer, until the 1960s. Bletchley Park, the home of code breakers in England during World War II (which included the mathematician Alan Turing of Enigma code fame), famously used a cryptic crossword in The Daily Telegraph in 1942 to recruit candidates. Crosswords did to words what jigsaws did to shapes, and they remain a staple of newspapers (in print and online) to this day.

Dudeney contributed significantly to logic puzzles: called Smith-Robinson-Jones puzzles due to the original puzzle in his 1931 collection Puzzles and Curious Problems, these involve a series of statements which the solver uses to deduce the answer to one or more questions. In the original puzzle, the reader is introduced to three businessmen named Smith, Robinson, and Jones, as well as three railwaymen with the same names, and must identify which of them is an engineer through a series of logical statements. Such puzzles can be solved by drawing grids of the possibilities and eliminating possibilities that were excluded, thus narrowing down on the answer. Logic puzzles were elevated to another level in the 1970s by Raymond Smullyan, who wrote the books What Is the Name of This Book? and The Lady or the Tiger, as well as two books on chess problems.

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After the 15-Puzzle and crosswords, the next dominant force in the world of puzzles was the Rubik’s Cube, which was invented by Erno Rubik and first appeared in 1977 under the name “Magic Cube.” By 1980 the Rubik’s Cube was marketed throughout the world, and more than 100 million authorized units, as well as an estimated 50 million unauthorized imitations, were sold, mostly during its subsequent three years of popularity. The craze died down, but it was revived in the new millennium when Rubik’s patent expired and more companies started making the cube. Also immensely popular is sudoku, originally seen in puzzle magazines under the name “number place” in 1979 but popularized in 2004 when Wayne Gould, a Hong Kong judge, developed a computer program to generate sudoku and sold the concept to The Times newspaper in London. Now sudoku puzzles are a staple across countries and newspapers. Sudoku and Rubik’s Cube have both maintained popularity thanks to their simplicity. The rules are very simple, and the speed of solving them is entirely up to the skills of the solver. Kakuro and KenKen are among the variations that have evolved from sudoku, but they have a larger arithmetic component than sudoku and have not been as popular.

Puzzles have made their way into the world of entertainment as well. For example, in the British game show The Crystal Maze, a team of contestants take on a range of challenges set within a labyrinth of the same name consisting of four time zones, winning a “time crystal” for each one they successfully complete. Reaching the centre piece of the maze, the “Crystal Dome,” the team members then work together collecting a certain amount of gold tokens to win a prize, the allotted time inside the dome being determined by the number of crystals they obtained in the previous zones. The show was immensely popular and lasted nine seasons. In 2016 The Crystal Maze Live Experience opened, allowing the public to buy tickets and compete in a replica of the game show’s zones and challenges. The 2018 American film Puzzle has Kelly Macdonald playing a middle-class homemaker who discovers she has a gift for assembling puzzles.

Amid all the recreational puzzles are puzzles that have become part of serious competitions, including the World Puzzle Championship, an annual international puzzle competition run by the World Puzzle Federation. All the puzzles in the competition are pure logic problems based on simple principles, designed to be playable regardless of language or culture. National teams are determined by local affiliates of the World Puzzle Federation. Of the 28 championships held from 1992 to 2019, 15 have been won by the United States, 8 by Germany, 3 by the Czech Republic, and 2 by Japan. The most successful individual contestant is Ulrich Voigt of Germany, with 11 titles since 2000. From being an educational aid to a source of fun to a serious matter, puzzles have come full circle.

Puzzle genres

The history of puzzles has seen multiple genres of puzzles come up over time. Jigsaw puzzles, tangrams, and the Greek Stomachion are examples of tiling puzzles, in which several shapes must be assembled into a larger shape without overlaps. Tiling puzzles are most popularly available in a two-dimensional format, though harder three-dimensional variants are also available.

Mathematical puzzles typically require the solver to find solutions that satisfy one or more conditions. Some math puzzles, like the Bridges of Königsberg, have gone on to define entire fields of study. Logic puzzles are like math puzzles in that the solution must meet a certain set of conditions. Sudoku, which requires the solver to put the numbers 1–9 on a grid while meeting certain criteria, is a logic puzzle. Chess puzzles are a special category in which the rules are determined by the game of chess itself.

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The 15-Puzzle is a sliding puzzle. Sliding puzzles challenge a solver to slide pieces along certain routes to reach a desired arrangement of pieces. Mazes, on the other hand, involve a player moving a token across a board; these are called tour puzzles. A special kind of tour puzzle is the hedge maze, where the players themselves must physically move through the maze.

Mechanical puzzles consist of a set of mechanically interlinked pieces in which the solution is achieved through manipulation of the whole object or parts of it. The most famous mechanical puzzle is the Rubik’s cube. Mechanical puzzles include many subgenres—such as disentanglement puzzles, wherein the goal is to disentangle a metal or string loop from an object, and disassembly puzzles, where the solver must open or divide the puzzle into pieces. Japanese puzzle boxes, with their secret opening mechanisms, are part of this category.

Word puzzles, which use a play of words or language to challenge the solver, cover a large range of puzzle types, from crosswords to riddles to word search puzzles. The popular television game show Wheel of Fortune is centred on a word puzzle. Boggle, Scrabble, and Words with Friends are all games based on word puzzles.

Serious puzzle setters often combine different puzzle genres together to make their puzzles harder to solve. Different genres appeal to different kinds of people, and this popularity can be seen in the sheer number of puzzle books and toys in travel shops at airports and train stations.

Puzzle solving: Why are puzzles so popular?

Lewis Carroll is credited with writing the following about puzzles:

Whenever the Philosophy of Puzzles comes to be fully discussed…, one chief merit of that form of recreation will be declared to be that it offers a bribe to the human intellect…to exert itself, on however trivial a matter, so as not to spend all its waking hours in simple stagnation. All healthy mental games have the same merit.

Puzzles originated as useful learning aids to teach children basic math, as evidenced by so many puzzles centred on weights and measures and distances, all everyday topics and objects that puzzle creators were seeking to enlighten the solver about. They became more widely popular in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, filling up the additional time newly available to people. With the rise of crosswords, word searches, and, more recently, sudoku, they have gone mass-market and are available to almost everyone.

What exercise is to the body, puzzles are to the brain. The rise in popularity of puzzles over time has been accompanied by a score of psychological studies on the effects of puzzle solving on health. Puzzles have been shown to improve memory, drive creativity, and build concentration. Puzzles have been shown to produce dopamine, which in turn improves confidence and increases memory. Some studies, the results of which are inconclusive, also hint at puzzle solving slowing down the aging process. Publication of these studies has in turn driven more people toward puzzle solving.

Many puzzle solvers have a preferred type, or types, of puzzles. Some, such as jigsaw puzzles, crosswords, and sudoku, become progressively easier as the solver fills in more and more of the grid, which has contributed to their popularity. Sudoku and other similar puzzles, in addition to having very simple rules, also have a set of standard difficulty levels. The standardization of these levels is possible because they can be solved by computers in a fraction of a second, and thus a difficulty level can be assigned to them. Solvers, in turn, are more engaged because they are interested in conquering the entire range of difficulty levels. While the rise in computing power could be seen as rendering many erstwhile challenging puzzles obsolete, since all it now requires to solve them is a strong algorithm, people continue to show interest in puzzles nevertheless.

On the flip side, sophisticated computer algorithms are now capable of generating puzzles on a mass scale. While this has led to a proliferation of easy-to-create puzzle books in bookshops, as well as puzzle-focused mobile apps, it has also diminished the role of a puzzle creator who crafts customized puzzles and compiles them for a reader. Puzzle setters in the mold of Lewis Carroll continue to exist, but the puzzles they create now occupy the realm of the esoteric. Puzzle aficionados seek out such puzzles, and puzzle groups locally and on the Internet constantly debate newer and harder puzzles. Puzzle solvers seeking to sharpen their minds or fill their free time with puzzles need look no farther than their smartphones or the local bookstore. But, to the enigmatologist (one who studies puzzles), discovering new puzzles is as much of a delightful endeavour as solving them.