Puzzling Behavior and Riddle Answer

Have you ever heard the phrase "puzzling behavior?" As in, that person's behavior is puzzling? It's a phrase I find interesting. It means that it's difficult to understand the words or actions of a person, who, at the moment, seems to be defying the usual paths of logic and emotion. We just can't figure them out.
Note that the phrase doesn't say their behavior is wrong. And that's why I find the phrase interesting. What we are saying is "I need to continue to imaging myself faced with the choices, having the history and wanting what this person wants in order to understand what they are doing."

In other words, make the journey they are making...

and the riddle answer to "how many grooves are on the average LP record is (drum roll please)....

Two.

There's one on the front, and one on the back.

Friday Riddle anyone?

Riddles are similar to puzzles in that the solver must use knowledge or ingenuity to answer the question posed. So, I want to offer this simple riddle for Friday. This should be especially nice for those of us old enough to recall the concept of an Long Playing Record Album:

Riddle: According to industry sources, how many grooves are on the average LP record album?

If you know the answer, please post. I'll post the answer Monday or Tuesday of next week.

Question: what's more fun the single-handedly crushing a puzzle or solving a riddle? I think it's making that journey to solution with colleagues and friends. Help prove me right or wrong by joining with your friends in accomplishing a puzzle. I believe you'll find the synergy of collaboration exciting.

I can think of no better way to try this out than in attending "Bagels & BabelDoKu" at Fat Daddy's Coffee on Amherst St in Nashua. Won't you join me on Sunday, 9 September from 10:30 to 12:30 to play some puzzles, sip some coffee and nosh some bagels? I'll provide a practice puzzle, then we'll tackle two puzzles, each in their own races, with prizes for the winners and runners up.

Puzzles and Knowledge or Ingenuity

A puzzle is a game or toy that requires knowledge or ingenuity to solve. And, as we discussed in the previous blog, I feel a good puzzle must require an enjoyable journey that makes the player work a bit hard, but not too hard.

What about the knowledge or ingenuity needed to solve a puzzle? For a puzzle to be satisfying, the player must either have the directly applicable knowledge to crack the puzzle, OR the ability to synthesize two or more areas of knowledge to "think outside the box" and solve it. I think the later is the more enjoyable kind of puzzle.

BabelDoKu puzzles allow a player to use her vocabulary skills and familiarity with famous quotations along with her logical ability to recognize letters already used in a column, row or subgrid TOGETHER to solve the empty cells in the puzzle. Please, go to BabelDoKu.com, download a free puzzle, and see what I mean.

What makes a good puzzle?

This space is about puzzles, so to start with, we should talk about what makes something a puzzle. A puzzle is a toy, game or problem that requires ingenuity or knowledge to solve. But there has to be more to it than that, right. Counting all the potholes in Blackburn Lancashire UK (there are 4,000 according to the Beatles in "A Day in the Life") is a problem that would require knowledge to solve, but that doesn't sound like something I would enjoy spending my free time answering. Certainly there has to be something like an enjoyable journey of discovery in the process of solving a puzzle. Some examples of what I mean: trying a jigsaw puzzle piece in several places before making it fit, solving a riddle to the location of a treasure, or finding the correct path through a maze. What about such a journey separates a mediocre puzzle from a truly great one? I think it must be a mix of "solvability" and difficulty. A great puzzle must require a tough, non-trivial journey (not just counting potholes) without seeming to be too tough.

For BabelDoKu puzzles, I vary the number of empty cells to make a puzzle either easy (not many empty cells to begin with) or hard. I also choose the difficulty of the words, clues and quotations used in my puzzles to add another dimension of difficulty.

The First Book Signing

This past Saturday, I completed my first book signing at Toadstool Bookshop in Milford, NH. Special thanks to Jan, who made me feel welcomed and help me set up a cozy little area near the front door in which to talk about my puzzles. I met several nice folks who left with smiles and copies of my first puzzle book, BabelDoKu #1.
I hope to do many, many more of these. It's fun to see people's reactions when the deduce a word or arrive at a quote!
Cheers!