“Lewis Carroll popularized logic puzzles in the late nineteenth century and have been popular ever since. Games like Sudoku and Mastermind are entertaining and captivating pastimes, but they also share a strong mathematical logic and merit serious intellectual investigation. Games for Your Mind lets you test your skills against a range of challenges while exploring the past and present of logic games.
Jason Rosenhouse begins this educational and amusing book by introducing readers to logic and logic puzzles before going on to discuss the fascinating history of these puzzles. He demonstrates how Carroll’s puzzles inspired his scholarly logic work and presented Aristotelian reasoning as a game for kids. He describes how Raymond Smullyan, another pioneer of logic games, used age-old games about liars and truth-tellers to demonstrate Kurt Gödel’s theorems and shed light on important issues in mathematical logic. Then, using nonclassical logic, which is currently used in computer science and automated reasoning to manipulate sizable and occasionally contradictory amounts of data, Rosenhouse offers a fresh outlook on the future of logic games.
This vibrant and interesting book collects many of the most brilliant puzzles ever created, including the “Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever,” meta puzzles, paradoxes, and the logic puzzles in detective fiction. It offers a multitude of sample riddles ranging from easy to extremely difficult.”
