Puzzles and dystopian fiction have a recurring theme in common: those in power forcing their subjects to play twisted games for entertainment. Crack the spine of any brainteaser book, and it reads like The Hunger Games–prisoners vying for their lives and monarchs sacrificing their servants in the name of logic.
Although most view tic-tac-toe as a kid’s game, puzzle designers see it as a canvas. I think the game’s simplicity almost taunts people—is a 3x3 grid with only two possible symbols really going to stump you? Yet members of the puzzle community continue to devise ingenious little twists to keep the game fresh and…
This week’s puzzle is difficult. Not because it has an exceedingly complicated solution, but because the idea that underlies it is deep and ingenious. I only know of one method to solve it, but I’m curious whether alternative approaches exist. Feel free to spitball half-baked ideas in the comments. You might find…
Tech companies are infamous for torturing career hopefuls with mind-melters during interviews. This week, you’ll try your hand at one without the stress of job prospects on your shoulders. Google is rumored to have used this puzzle over the years, although it has since retired the practice altogether.
In 2023, I posed 23 challenges as part of the Gizmodo Monday Puzzle series. Some require a bit of math, and others a light familiarity with physics; but most can be solved through logic and creative thinking. For each of the following puzzles, I provide a link to the solution, but I suggest you resist the temptation…
Every few months, a math problem goes viral on social media. Disappointingly often, it lacks mathematical meat. It seems over half of them boil down to the order of operations. Some tweet will get thousands of likes claiming that the Internet is divided over an arithmetic problem like: what does 6÷2(1+2) equal? It’s…
Here’s a mind-blowing geography fact: The northernmost part of Brazil is closer to Canada than it is to the southernmost part of Brazil. Facts like this partly speak to truly unusual geographical features of Earth (like Brazil’s massive land area) but also to how warped our perception can be of our own home. We’ve…
Hidden amid its trademark satire of average American life, The Simpsons is riddled with mathematical Easter eggs. The show’s writing staff has boasted an impressive pedigree of Ivy League mathheads who couldn’t resist infusing America’s longest-running sitcom with inside jokes, scattered about like sprinkles on…
