January 5, 2011
Everything I Ever Needed To Know In Life, I Learned From Logic Puzzles
I first met logic puzzles in the third grade. These were the kind sometimes called “crosshatch,” “grid,” or “matrix” style, where you use one symbol to indicate a proven match and a different symbol to indicate a proven non-match. For example, if you had to match five people to their ages, preferred colors and condiments, the matrix might look like this:
Sample Matrix Puzzle
Notice that some information has already been filled in: Jane doesn’t prefer green, Simon is 15. By additional deduction, Simon has been ruled out for any other age, and other people have been ruled out for age 15. By reading clues such as “the person who likes green also likes marmalade or honey,” we continue to add these symbols until we have matched everything together.
When I was in high school–after years of playing these puzzles during my spare time–a student in the 6th grade class where I was assisting asked my opinion of the O.J. Simpson trial that was in all the news. I told him I didn’t have enough evidence to form an opinion. He pressed me, “But what do you think?” “I think that I don’t know,” was my answer, “and after all the information has been filtered by reporters and lawyers, I’m not sure that anyone knows enough to render a verdict.” He continued to push, insistent that I must have formed some kind of idea around O.J.’s guilt or innocence. The idea that I had not formed an opinion seemed completely incomprehensible to him.
In other conversations, I became aware of similar patterns of thinking: skeptics assumed that anything that was unproven was false; believers would accept many claims as proven until disproven. From cognitive psychology I would eventually learn that there is a strong tendency in human beings to sort things into two groups (i.e. X is either “true” or “false”), yet somehow I had learned to sort into three: true, false, and unproven. Moreover, I was more comfortable than many of my peers at holding an idea as “unproven” for long periods; most folks seem uncomfortable until they have sorted out where something belongs.
I can’t say for sure, but I strongly suspect that this was something I learned from those matrix logic puzzles. After all, in order to get good at the puzzles, I had to remember that there were actually three symbols, not just two: a blank square was a kind of symbol. To solve the puzzles, I had to hold the idea in my mind that a square was blank (neither proven nor disproven) until I was prepared to assign another symbol to it. To excel, I had to hold back my impatience that a particular match had not been proven either way, or I would jump to a false conclusion and mess up my results.
This was only one of the many great lessons I learned from logic puzzles. How about you? Any puzzle fans out there? What lessons–big or small–have logic puzzles taught you? If you’ve never tried them, www.puzzle-bridges.com has some great starter puzzles (not the grid kind), and let me know about your experience.
