
Each year on January 29th, National Puzzle Day recognizes how exercising our brains with puzzles is just one of its many benefits.
- 2300 BC – Before modern puzzles, labyrinth drawing puzzles were popular in Ancient Egypt.
- 250 BC – Greek mathematician Archimedes puzzled around 250 B.C. to solve geometry problems. He cut a square into 14 pieces and then examined how many different configurations could be made from those 14 pieces. This puzzle was recently solved by Bill Cutler, a mathematician from Cornell University, who showed the puzzle has 536 truly distinct solutions.
- 1767 – Engraver and mapmaker John Spilsbury invented the first jigsaw puzzle in 1767. He drew a map on top of a piece of wood and then used a jigsaw to cut it into small pieces.
- 1783 – The Sudoku story began in 1783 when Leonhard Euler, a Swiss mathematician, devised ‘Latin Squares’, which he described as a new kind of magic squares’.
- 1877 – Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, invented the word ladder puzzle. – Source
- 1891 – The “Geographical Puzzle” was the first wooden puzzle produced in 1891 by Ravensburger, the world’s leading puzzle maker.
- 1909 – Puzzles become a full-blown craze in the United States.
- 1909 – Parker Brothers devoted their entire factory to manufacturing puzzles.
- 1913 – Crossword puzzles came into use in 1913. Arthur Wynne, an editor of New York World, needed a way to take up some space in the ‘fun’ section of his newspaper right around Christmastime. This “Word Cross Puzzle” became almost an overnight sensation and has been in high demand from that time on.
- 1933 – During the Great Depression, puzzle sales soared to 10 million per week.
- 1944 – a crossword puzzle was printed with answers all containing D-Day operation code names, which sent MI-5 into a panic thinking their invasion plans had been discovered. – Source
- 1980 – Ronald Graham offered a prize of $100 for anyone who could solve his “Boolean Pythagorean Triples Problem.” In 2016, three computer scientists solved the puzzle, using a supercomputer for 2 days, and came out with proof that takes up 200TB of storage space. – Source
- 1989 – Stave Puzzles released a jigsaw puzzle with no solution – much to the rage of the many puzzlers who unknowingly strove to complete it! The puzzle’s first thirty buyers were refunded their purchase price.
- 1996 – The day before the 1996 U.S. presidential election, the NYT Crossword contained the clue “Lead story in tomorrow’s newspaper,” the puzzle was built so that both electoral outcomes were correct answers, requiring 7 other clues to have dual responses. – Source
- 2002 – When the New York Sun was relaunched in 2002, its first edition carried the solution to the last crossword puzzle that the earlier Sun published before it folded in 1950. – Source
- 2007 – A puzzle was released and $2 million prizes were offered for the first complete solution. The competition ended at noon on 31 December 2010, with no solution being found. – Source
- 2011 – People playing Foldit, an online puzzle game about protein folding, resolved the structure of an enzyme that causes an AIDS-like disease in monkeys. Researchers have been working on the problem for 13 years. The gamers solved it in three weeks. – Source
- Jigsaw puzzles are popular among Americans. Approximately half of America’s population bought at least three to six puzzles a year. That’s about 1.8 billion jigsaw puzzles sold each year.
- Puzzles stimulate the brain, keeping it active, and practicing its skills.
- The inventor of the Rubik’s Cube didn’t realize he’d built a puzzle until he scrambled it the first time and tried to restore it. – Source
- Will Shortz, the New York Times crossword puzzle editor, is the only person in the world to have a degree in enigmatology, the study of puzzles. – Source
- There is a cryptic organization called Cicada 3301 that posts challenging puzzles online, possibly to recruit codebreakers and linguists. – Source
- The fastest way to do a jigsaw is to sort all the different colors into groups before you begin. The real ‘Experts’ stand up all the time because sitting cramps their style!
- Most crossword puzzles are vertically symmetrical, meaning they look the same if you flip them upside down. – Source
- The mathematical puzzle solved by Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting is a straightforward graph theory problem. – Source
- The phrase “thinking outside the box” was popularized as the solution to a topographical puzzle involving 9 dots in a box shape. – Source
- The original King’s Quest, is one of the most infamously difficult puzzles in video game history, requiring the player to guess Rumpelstiltskin’s name backward but using an inverted alphabet (A=Z, B=Y, etc). The correct answer is ”Ifnkovhgroghprm”. – Source
- Blank spaces in the crossword puzzles are called “Light” as they help in giving clues for other answers. – Source
- There are roughly 27 Million websites on Google with the phrase Jigsaw Puzzle in it. Surprisingly, only about 8.5 Million sites have the phrase Crossword Puzzle.
- A 1,000-piece Ravensburger puzzle has 1,008 pieces. To keep the puzzle rectangular, this piece count needed eight additional pieces to keep its shape. The vertical side of a 1,000-piece puzzle has 28 pieces, whereas the horizontal side of the puzzle has 36.
- Types of Puzzles
-
- Jigsaw Puzzles: The classic interlocking pieces forming an image when completed.
- Crossword Puzzles: Grids of squares where clues lead to the filling of words both horizontally and vertically.
- Sudoku: A number puzzle where the objective is to fill a 9×9 grid with digits so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3×3 sub-grids contains all of the digits from 1 to 9.
- Word Search: Grids of letters containing hidden words that need to be found.
- Brain Teasers: Logical and mathematical puzzles that often require creative thinking.
- Trivia Quizzes: Question and answer challenges covering a wide range of topics.
- Scavenger Hunts: A game where participants follow clues to find specific items or solve puzzles.
- Escape Room Puzzles: Challenges designed for groups to solve within a set time to “escape” from a room.
- Picture Puzzles: Puzzles where an image needs to be assembled or decoded.
- Logic Puzzles: Challenges that require deductive reasoning and logical thinking.
- Mazes: Paths through a complex network that need to be navigated from start to finish.
- Cryptic Puzzles: Puzzles that involve deciphering codes or hidden messages.
- Tangrams: Ancient Chinese puzzles that involve arranging seven flat pieces to form a specific shape.
- Riddles: Puzzles in the form of questions, problems, or statements that require creative thinking to solve.
- Kakuro: A number puzzle game that is often referred to as a mathematical crossword.
Sources:
Disclaimer
The information contained in South Florida Reporter is for general information purposes only.
The South Florida Reporter assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions in the contents of the Service.
In no event shall the South Florida Reporter be liable for any special, direct, indirect, consequential, or incidental damages or any damages whatsoever, whether in an action of contract, negligence or other tort, arising out of or in connection with the use of the Service or the contents of the Service. The Company reserves the right to make additions, deletions, or modifications to the contents of the Service at any time without prior notice.
The Company does not warrant that the Service is free of viruses or other harmful components