Lewis Carroll Invented The Word Ladder Puzzle. He Also Wrote Alice In Wonderland

Each year on January 29th, National Puzzle Day recognizes how exercising our brains with puzzles is just one of its many benefits.

• Whether it’s a crossword, jigsaw, trivia, word searches, brain teasers or Soduku, puzzles put our minds to work. Studies have found that when we work on a jigsaw puzzle, we use both sides of the brain.  And spending time daily working on puzzles improves memory, cognitive function, and problem-solving skills.
• 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
• Jigsaw puzzles soared in popularity during the great depression, as they provided a cheap, long-lasting, recyclable form of entertainment. – Source
• In 1944, by a huge coincidence, 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
•  In 1980, Ronald Graham offered a prize of $100 for anyone who could solve his “Boolean Pythagorean Triples Problem.” Last year, three computer scientists solved the puzzle, using a supercomputer over the course of 2 days, and came out with a proof that takes up 200TB of storage space. – Source
• The word ladder puzzle was invented by Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. – Source
• 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
• In 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
• The phrase “thinking outside the box” was popularised from the solution to a topographical puzzle involving 9 dots in a box shape. – Source
• The original King’s Quest, in one of the most infamously difficult puzzles in video game history, required the player to guess Rumpelstiltskin’s name backwards, but using an inverted alphabet (A=Z, B=Y, etc). The correct answer is”Ifnkovhgroghprm”. – Source
• The original King’s Quest, in one of the most infamously difficult puzzles in video game history, required the player to guess Rumpelstiltskin’s name backwards, 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 as well. – Source
• 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.
• Engraver and mapmaker John Spilsbury is credited with inventing the first jigsaw puzzle in 1767. He drew a map on top of a piece of wood, then used a jigsaw to cut it into small pieces. The name clearly stuck! Kids today still learn geography by using jigsaw puzzles of maps. In fact, the “Geographical Puzzle” was the first wooden puzzle produced in 1891 by Ravensburger, the world’s leading puzzle maker.
• 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.

Sources:

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