Logic puzzles

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Continuing the discussion from Anyone here a fan of logic puzzles?:

I think we are going in a derailing-adjacent direction, and I also think I very much want to continue talking about it, so I split it into this new topic. :slight_smile:

It’s an excellent question, and to be honest, I phrased my original position using very clear examples (towers of hanoi, lights out) on purpose, because I can clearly point at those and say “this is preventing me from continuing the game that I am enjoying, like I stopped playing an adventure game and started playing this other thing instead.” Now, this can be a deal-breaker for me, but not for many people, just like very specific puzzles (nonograms, cryptograms) are not a deal-breaker for me because I find them fun. I actually don’t enjoy most logic puzzles, for some reason. Grid logic happens to be something I like.

I could try and go into why, possibly it’s because the ones I like are like incremental deduction and the ones I don’t are figuring out a sequence of moves, but it may not be useful. But it’s probably useful for an author to know that including a puzzle like this, like including an arcade section in an adventure game, is likely to annoy some (not all) players. It’s best if the author is aware of this; then they can choose whether they want to go ahead with that or not.

I actually hate safecracking puzzles and riddles, not so much because they distract from the story (in a sense, when you’re stuck on a puzzle, it’s generally true that the experience has somehwhat ground to a halt while you try to solve it; it that were my problem, I’d have no tolerance for getting stuck at all), but because they often ask you to come up with a solution by giving you clues that may be interpreted multiple way. Combinations are like… wow, do I try adding these numbers up? Subtracting them? Multiplying them? Alternating them? This is just a brief example to show that what the author may think is a reasonable set of clues may actually have the player go in a wildly different direction.

I should pause here and comment that, for many people, this is the appeal. Try a hypothesis. It didn’t work. Try another one until you find the one that works. In a sense, this is how puzzles work. But, crucially: these combination-style puzzles have no feedback. All you have is “no, try again”. What I consider to be a good puzzle is one that doesn’t necessarily handhold me or spoon-feed me the solution but does acknowledge what I am trying to do, and crucially detects if my thought process is going into wild territory (“Maybe I need to multiply these by “pi” because there is a pie nearby?”) and gently nudges me back into sanity.

And this is where I think the art really is, because this nudging doesn’t have to be explicit. This is difficult to apply to safecracking puzzles (hence my dislike), but as I experiment wildly when fun, it means volumes to me when the game elegantly responds to certain interactions with a response that makes me think “ah, I guess I should move away from trying to use this object”, or even better, a certain response clicks in me what that item would best be used for. I remember having just that experience in Mulldoon Legacy. More recently, Arborea was very satisfying, and, surprisingly, so was A Paper Moon.

To get back on track: self-contained little puzzling moments like finding combinations (or towers of hanoi :stuck_out_tongue: ) usually don’t have this feedback. It’s like playing the first Discwolrd game. My strongest memory of that game is Eric Idle saying “That doesn’t work”. And when you put it like that, it does seem like something didn’t really go great.

So I think that, to be honest, every puzzle can potentially detract from the story - and, more importantly, the experience. Preventing that from happening isn’t a checklist, so it’s not like one can say “do this, don’t do that, it’s gold”. It varies from game to game, experience to experience. But these self-contained puzzle moments have a lot more potential to stop the story until you get it. Like an arcade sequence. And if you’re invested in the experience that the story was giving you, and now are stuck on a puzzle that may not reflect that experience…

I’ll even make another point, that a game that commits to that experience, like Ad Verbum or Andrew Schultz’s chess-puzzly and/or wordplay games, is a totally different beast, because those puzzles are the experience, as opposed to taking you out of them. So for those, I’d say it’s totally fine.

As usual, though, this is just my opinion. :slight_smile: What undercuts everything I am saying is that tons of people do enjoy what I don’t.

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Thanks, that’s already useful for planning puzzles: Perhaps give (careful) feedback while the player is trying to solve the puzzle, not just No or Yes.

And yes, this IS subjective, I’m sure.

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I fully agree with this. Jason Dyer’s All the Adventures series runs into this a lot; it was a big problem with early text adventures. Here’s one post where he discusses it.

The author knew the boot was fished from the sea, but somehow failed to convey this fact. The author knew the nature of the boot’s magic. The author knew the boot’s magic could be activated via waving. The author knew the “royal entrance” was next to the sign, but not right at it. If given all those facts, it’s possible to logically conclude both that WAVE BOOT is the right action and where it should be done; without these facts, the player is instead using abduction. They can see the crime scene after the fact and can only make their best guess about what to do.

I’d say the lesson here is: if a puzzle requires the player to make multiple calculations/insights/deductions/guesses in a row, provide feedback at each step of the process so they know if they’re on the right track or not. And I’d say this goes for both hammer and lightbulb puzzles.

That’s actually part of why I like logic grids and crosswords and such. You’re getting constant feedback about what’s correct and what isn’t: if your “across” answer and your “down” answer in a crossword disagree about the square where they cross, then one of them is wrong. If they agree, that’s a good sign they’re both right.

The Towers of Hanoi, on the other hand, don’t provide any feedback whatsoever. You either know the algorithm and do it right from the beginning, or you don’t. Flailing around randomly is equally likely to help as to hurt.

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That resonates very strongly with me!

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Now, wouldn’t that be diabolical if a crossword had lots of cases where a false answer fits but still has the right letter for at least some of its intersections? Or False answers that share no letters with the correct answer, but which prompt wrong answers for all intersecting clues. Admittedly, no clue how doable this would be in making a real puzzle… thinking up word pairs with the same length with letters in common is easy, thinking of clues whethere the wrong answer fits and seems as likely to be guessed as the real answer is harder.

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That can happen in crosswords, to be sure. :slight_smile: It’s part of the challenge, I think.

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There are a few crosswords that go all the way on this and make multiple answers possible! There was a famous one in the New York Times, on the day of the 1996 presidential election. The clue for 43 across was “The headline of tomorrow’s newspaper (!)”, and you could put in either CLINTON WINS or BOB DOLE WINS, with everything else still fitting. A “black Halloween animal” could be either a CAT or a BAT, for example, a “French 101 word” could be either LUI or OUI, and a “provider of support, for short” could either be an IRA (retirement account) or a BRA.

You can see the whole puzzle here, though I’m not sure how accessible that site is unfortunately.

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I wonder if it being 43 across was a deliberate nod to the fact that, had Bob Dole won, he would have been the 43rd president since we nonsensically count Grover Cleveland as both 22nd and 24th.

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There’s a documentary about the nyt cross word competition and has dole and Clinton in it! I have it on dvd and it has a few mini docs on other interesting puzzles in the extras

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Hey, Draconis-sensei, I do the merriam Webster crossword sometimes (it’s the only one I can access from my workstation) and it was there that I saw for the first time things like answers that span more than one word, as per your example, as well as words that are misspelled, or, to put it another way, spelled colloquially, which may result in you knowing the word but not how the puzzle wants you to spell it. What do you think about the fairness of these? The MW ones I do don’t tell you whether it’s multiple-word, and sometimes hint at colloquialisms by having the question spelled colloquially, but not necessarily always.

Come to think of it, crosswords invariably have certain answers which rely on geography or pop culture knowledge that I simply don’t know, and have to research. But it’s probably not expected of a crossword solver to honestly know everything, so maybe the act of researching to find an answer is part of the process and part of the fun? But in the modern days, with the internet, that is much faster and easier than it was before, so you can trivially look up so many things, you can do whole parts of the crossword without much thought. This was not so back in the day. Maybe modern crosswords feel that, because it’s so easy to research and look up, it’s ok to put more of these types of questions?

Never thought about crossworld puzzle design at all, but all of a sudden I’m getting an appreciation for it.

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Not for me. I learned crosswords centuries ago as a kid, and to me looking up the answer feels like cheating. It’s not cheating but it feels like it for me.

For me problems arise when they ask for rivers in faraway countries, like Kazachstan. I simply don’t know that.

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For me too! I very much resist doing that, but like you say right after, there are things that it’s very unlikely most people know. So they have to research. Thing is, back then, researching took time and effort, and was closer to actually learning something, so maybe it was the whole point? “It’s ok if you don’t know this, but we invite you to go look it up on an atlas”. This is vastly different from today, where those things are a google search away.

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I’m remembering my Sudoku experience, for some reason. I really liked Sudoku until it became a thing where, in order to solve certain puzzles, I had to learn and apply more complex techniques. At which point the game was no longer “find which number goes here through logical elimination”, which I like, but instead “apply these techniques”, which quickly resulted in me not seeing the numbers anymore and looking for patterns that would enable those techniques. I was no longer solving Sudoku, I was solving the technique for playing it. Or at least that’s what it felt like. That’s when I bounced off of it permanently; from that point on, Sudoku felt mechanical, like just pencilling in the possibilities then looking for patterns. There was no logic any more, or rather, there was no more thought involved; just the blanket, repetitive application of techniques.

Up until then, I was enjoying it.

There is, of course, such a thing as “the more you experience something, the more techniques you develop to get past hurdles”, but I’m not sure this is the same. At a certain point the techniques change the experience so much that what you first enjoyed may no longer be there. I am also reminded of games which allow you to combine multiple items or creatures in different ways, and you can, say, mix a fire dragon with a water dragon to create a whiskey dragon (I just woke up, so these associations will be whatever pops into my mind), and you can cross a water dragon with a wind dragon to create a rain dragon, and you can cross a rain dragon with a fire dragon to create an acid rain dragon… these games are unappealing to me because it’s just exhausting combinations, and you need to start taking notes of the ones you tried, and all of a sudden what was supposed to be fun looks too much like work; it’s tickling a different part of my brain I don’t want to tickle right now.

Now, the whole dragon thing can hardly be called a logic puzzle, true. But those games often offer more than just that, so this is one part of the game (the rest is what you do with your dragon, and growing it, and etc). So I bring it up as an example of a type of gameplay morphing into another, less differently appealing one. Which funnily enough brings me again to my original point about the wisdom of being wary about breaking up one’s IF to include certain puzzles.

Since the first post here is essentially me dumping my preferences, I thought it might also be useful to contextualise those preferences with this post.

EDIT - As opposed to Sudoku, I always enjoy me a nice nonogram. :slight_smile: Traditional black-and-white OR colour. Somehow, even as I am applying techniques, I’m not switching mental gears; the techniques don’t drive me away from what I’m doing. Anyway, I don’t even know many techniques formally, except for the ones I figured out by myself. Quite probably the fact that I came up with them myself keeps me in the experience, because they arose from my logical process, whereas in Sudoku I had to go out and learn about other techniques and probably never fully internalised them.

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I’m currently at the point where I could and should learn the advanced Sudoku techniques you are talking about. Or stick to “easy” level forever, but that’s not a good option for me. I wouldn’t be surprised if that same happens to me like to you, regarding Sudoku fun. Because these advanced techniques are very rational/mathematical if those are the right words.

Also I find Kakuro puzzles to be fun occasionally.

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My crossword experience is almost exclusively with the New York Times ones—sometimes the full-sized ones, but every day the Mini (tiny grid) and Midi (medium-sized grid), since I have time for those even during IFComp season—and the NYT has their own particular style guide that I’ve gotten used to. In particular, multi-word phrases are fine and won’t be explicitly indicated, but puns are marked with a “?”, and any clue requiring real-world knowledge (a name, a movie title, etc) can’t intersect another clue requiring real-world knowledge.

I still get tripped up by spelling sometimes, though, like a few days ago when they featured GO GETEM (short for “go get them”; I would spell it GO GETTEM) and GLUEING (I would spell it GLUING) right next to each other.

I also don’t like looking things up, even on a world-knowledge clue that I would have no way of getting otherwise. It’s more fun to have to fill in that word from the intersections.

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A cross word with a lot of mainstream celebrity or real world knowledge required strikes me as anti-fun and like I’d just be constantly googling something…

That said, I used to enjoy it when my history professor in college would assign crosswords where all of the clues and answers are related to whatever time and place we were covering at the time. Actually made history enjoyable despite it generally being my least favorite of the social sciences and the main reason I put the social sciences as my least favorite of the classic 4 core subjects.

Wouldn’t mind seeing how far I could get in a crossword book filled with puzzles built around STEAM subjects with the toughest puzzles assuming graduate or doctoral level knowledge… Not even sure how one might make a virtual crossword accessible though, crosswords are very much 2-dimentional but speech is very linear, and the assumption that English is read in lines means the crossword app would kind of need self-voiced reading of colums to be built-in… even with braille, multi-line displays are pricy and even the largest displays on the market only have a 10-line capacity and that capacity comes with a 15 grand price tag, so unless its a puzzle with all short words, good luck being able to view even a complete section of the board all at once in Braille… a system where you move between cells with the arrow keys and a voice announces something like 1 across 3, 3 down 1, blank to represent the active cell is the third letter of 1 across and the first letter of 3 down and is currently empty might be sufficient, but without a way to view the larger board efficiently, a lot of extra mental muscle goes to keeping the board in one’s head… I suspect word searches would have similar issues, especially given how often they rely on diagonally hidden words.

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Well, teachers can provide their lessons exciting or boring. I had history teachers which taught only the years. Boring!! And then I had a teacher who told stories from the specific time. That was fun and fueled interest for history!

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Regarding crosswords and quality of hinting, the obvious thing to bring up is Cryptic Crosswords, which are nice because each individual clue can be pretty unambiguously solved in isolation.