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Thursday 1 June 2017

Puzzle

The oldest known puzzle is a dissection of a square mentioned by Archimedes around 250BC. Archimedes asked how many solutions there were. The answer of 536 was only found in 2003.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, the origin of the word 'puzzle' is a bit of a puzzle. But the verb 'to puzzle' seems older than the noun 'puzzle'.

The first documented use of the word 'puzzle' to describe a new type of game) was as a verb in a book titled The Voyage of Robert Dudley...to the West Indies, 1594–95, narrated by Capt. Wyatt, by himself, and by Abram Kendall, master (published circa 1595). The word later came to be used as a noun.

Jigsaw puzzles were invented by the English mapmaker and geographer John Spilsbury. He used a marquetry saw to produce the first one in 1760.


Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, would lie awake all night devising mental puzzles to keep erotic thoughts at bay.

The crossword puzzle was invented by journalist Arthur Winn and published for the first time in the Sunday edition of the New York World on December 21, 1913.

New York Times' puzzle editor Will Shortz designed his own major program at Indiana University, and in 1974 became the first and only holder of a degree in Enigmatology, the study of puzzles.

The Rubik's Cube is a 3-D mechanical puzzle invented in 1974 by Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture Erno Rubik. It is widely considered to be the world's best-selling toy. It took Ernö Rubik, a whole month to solve his puzzle before he introduced it to the world.


The Sudoku puzzle was invented in America and first published in 1979 by Dell Magazines as Number Place. The puzzle was introduced in Japan by Nikoli in the paper Monthly Nikolist in 1984 where it soon became immensely popular. It took off in the UK, Israel, and Canada twenty years later, stimulating worldwide interest.


Tetris is a Soviet tile-matching puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov. It was in 1984, while he was working for the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the USSR in Moscow. He derived its name from the Greek numerical prefix tetra- (all of the game's pieces contain four segments) and tennis, Pajitnov's favorite sport.


Professor Layton is a puzzle adventure game series for the Nintendo DS and Nintendo 3DS developed by Level-5. They are a direct result of Akihiro Hino's childhood love of Akira Tago's popular Atama no Taisou series of puzzle books, which have sold more than 12 million copies to date in Japan. of April 2015, the series has sold over 15.5 million copies.

The puzzle-solving prowess of pigs have been known for centuries. In Georgian England learned porkers were frequently on view solving mathematical puzzles. Past studies have shown that pigs can be taught to distinguish between scribbles they have seen before and ones that are new. The only other animals known to be this observant are chimpanzees.


Source Daily Express

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