Logic puzzle

History

The logic puzzle was first produced by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who is better known under his pen name Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In his book, The Game of Logic, he introduced a game to solve problems such as confirming the conclusion "Some greyhounds are not fat" from the statements "No fat creatures run well" and "Some greyhounds run well". Puzzles like this, where we are given a list of premises and asked what can be deduced from them, are known as syllogisms. Dodgson goes on to construct much more complex puzzles consisting of up to eight premises.

In the second half of the 20th century, mathematician Raymond M. Smullyan continued and expanded the branch of logic puzzles with books such as The Lady or the Tiger?, To Mock a Mockingbird, and Alice in Puzzle-Land. He popularized the "knights and knaves" puzzles, which involve knights, who always tell the truth, and knaves, who always lie.

There are also logic puzzles that are completely non-verbal in nature. Some popular forms include Sudoku, which involves using deduction to correctly place numbers in a grid; the nonogram, also called "Paint by Numbers", which involves using deduction to correctly fill in a grid with black-and-white squares to produce a picture; and logic mazes, which involve using deduction to figure out the rules of a maze.