Puzzle Your Way to Intelligence

Puzzles have been around for centuries, and – according to the 1989 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary – the term “puzzle” has been with us since the end of 16th century. Sometimes the domain of children, whilst list of some of the older varieties of puzzle, as well as their more common and contemporary counterparts.

Wood

One of the earliest construction materials knows to man, wood has been around forever. Since the earliest shelters were being built, we’ve continuously found alternative ways in which to use it, including the construction and manufacture of many varieties of wooden puzzle.

1. Jigsaw Puzzles: A British man by the name of John Spilsbury is accredited with having created the puzzling phenomenon by placing a map on a sheet of wood and then sawing around the individual countries. He used these “jigsaw puzzles” as a learning aid to help students with geography.
2. Soma Cube: Created by Danish author Piet Hein in 1936, after attending a quantum mechanics lecture by Werner Heisenberg. You could say this puzzle is the grandfather of all those wooden cube puzzles you see about today. You know, the ones you get for Christmas and no one seems to be able to do them? Yeah, those ones.
3. Kumiki Puzzles: The Japanese word “kumiki” means the process of wood joinery, and refers to how traditional Japanese craftsmen would never use nails to hammer wood together (due to their propensity to come apart during earthquakes) and instead would resort to complex methods of joining the wood together so that nails were not needed at all. These craftsmen then transferred the genius of interlocking wood joinery from houses to puzzles, and so kumiki were born!
4. Tower of Hanoi: Invented by French mathematician Edouard Lucas in 1883, this puzzle is, of course, that favored of classroom learning puzzles in which you have to move a stack of four (or more) discs to the last peg of three adjacent pegs, moving only one peg per move, with no larger disc being placed on a smaller one. The lower the disc number, obviously the easier to solve, but the higher disc puzzles certainly provide their fair share of complexity!

Paper

After wood came a multitude of paper variations, before finally settling on the smooth and occasionally sharp material we know today. Paper puzzles have been no stranger to us, as it was found that in early 20th century, newspapers could increase their audience – and therefore their sales – if they published some types of puzzle(s), or puzzle contests in along with the paper. Paper puzzles are used everywhere from a physical therapy nurse’s office to the bored person on the subway.

5. Sudoku: The bane of partners everywhere, as their other half gets wrapped up in this logic-based game and is confined to the sofa for the whole weekend as they attempt puzzle after puzzle. The objective here is to fill a grid made of up smaller 3×3 boxes with each column and row containing the numbers 1-9, which can appear only once in each row/column.
6. Crosswords: Here you get a grid of black and white squares, with parts of this grid totally blacked-out so as to provide spaces for words that will form either horizontally or vertically in the white boxes left on the grid. Clues are provided and the participant has to use language, and other mental skills in order to solve the clues and make sure the word will fit in the appropriate box.
7. Chess Problems: These are puzzles which are set up using a chess board with an assortment of pieces in various positions left on it. The solver is then given some sort ofcondition, like having to checkmate a color within so many moves, before the puzzle can be called “solved”.
8. Word search: The humble word search may – for some of us – recall memories of afternoons spent in class, idling away the minutes with a teacher-made word search related to whatever topic was being studied in class. But the truth is that the word search can help practice not only vocabulary skills, but word recognition and – to a slight degree – spatial awareness, and they’re also good ways to pass the time.

Electric

With the advent of electricity, puzzles have taken ever-different and increasingly varied forms. One of the major products of the electrical age is the computer, so here we have some of the classic puzzle games available on a computer format.

9. Tetris: This is a game that almost everyone will play at some point or anything in their lives. Its colorful falling blocks will forever haunt us and we’ll have visions of slotting blocks into place even when we’re not playing! Tetris has also been scientifically provento increase the efficiency of brain activity.
10. Puzzle Bobble: A classic from the mid ‘90s arcade era. This was a game in which you fired colored bubbles from the bottom of the screen at other bubbles at the top of the screen in the hopes of creating a match of colors, which then caused the matched bubbles to pop and disappear.
11. Minesweeper: Another classic timewaster which comes preinstalled on most computers. This logic and number-based puzzle game was somewhat infuriating to the uninitiated, but soothing and rewarding to those able to understand how the numbers on the squares actually worked!
12. Brain Age: Known as “Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training” in the UK and Australia, this game was designed to be played a little each day in order to improved various aspects of mental functioning. Available on the Nintendo DS from ’06, this has proven to be popular with everyone, not just those that are into puzzle games. This is largely due to the fact that it requires no great period of commitment at any one time you play; you can simply pick it up and work it into your daily routine, stopping whenever you want to.

Reality

Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs for short, are games which use the real world as a setting for its multitude of puzzles and adventures. ARGs will likely make use of multiple media platforms in order to tell its story, making for an incredible experience that combines the efforts of many people from nations and cultures all around the world. Often tied into a viral marketing campaign for something else, ARGs are nevertheless gaining in popularity and are an interesting cultural phenomenon to observe.

13. I Love Bees: Serving as both a real-world experience and as a viral marketing campaign for the incredibly popular video game Halo 2, the main website received over 3,000,000 visitors over the course of the first three months of it being active in 2004.
14. Perplex City: This ARG had players racing to find an artifact of a fictional city (Perplex City) called the Receda Cube. It was started in April of 2005 and was finished in February of 2007, when the Cube was found in some woods in Northamptonshire, in the United Kingdom. Offering a real life reward of around $200,000, costs were offset by the developers – Mind Candy – as they released a series of collectable trading cards which contains puzzles and clues which would help out with the solving of the ARG as a whole.
15. The Lost Ring: Created by McDonald’s to help out with their marketing campaign for the Beijing Olympic games, this ARG saw people from around the world trying to solve the mystery of a fictional sport that disappeared roughly 2000 years ago.