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Brain Teasers Is your life uneventful? Is your job a bore? If so, there is no need to go through the day without a mental challenge. Just explore these mind games, puzzles and riddles, and get ready to be perplexed, frustrated and amazed. For some extra stimulation, try the Usenet discussion group. Web:
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Crossword Puzzles Do you like crossword puzzles? There are many, many puzzles on the Net that you can access for free whenever you want. There are also dictionaries, word lists, guides, computer programs, helpful tips, and a great deal of other crossword-related material. Now, if someone would only tell me the three-letter word for an Australian bird, and the two-letter name for the sun god, my life would be complete. Web:
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Hangman Hangman is a game in which you try to guess a mystery word, one letter at a time. When you guess a correct letter, you are shown where it appears in the word. When you guess a wrong letter, a new feature is added to a drawing of a little man. If the entire little man is drawn before you guess all the letters in the word correctly, you lose, and the little man gets hung. I wonder if this is a feminist game? (I could make a joke about a well-hung little man, but instead, I will content myself with wondering out loud why the game is not called "hangperson".) Web:
Mazes The best thing about having your own maze is you always have a good excuse for not doing something on time. ("I'm sorry I can't turn in my homework; my dog took it and dropped it in my maze.") If you are one of the few people who don't have a maze of their very own in the family room, you can at least explore and create mazes over the Net. Web:
Puzzles Do you like puzzles? There are enough puzzles (and solutions) on the Net to keep you busy indefinitely. But why should you do puzzles? Puzzles are good because they will help you think better. Thinking better turns you into a finer human being. And being a fine human being will help you become good looking, successful and powerful, with just the right amount of humility to make sure you are loved and respected by everyone you meet. (Well, it's always worked for me anyway.) Web:
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Riddle of the Day Try to solve the riddles and brain teasers posed by the Sphinx. If you can, you get immortalized in the Sphinx Hall of Fame. You can even submit your own sticklers here or browse the archive of past riddles with their answers. Web:
Rubik's Cube A Rubik's Cube is a puzzle in the shape of a cube, in which each of the 6 sides is composed of 9 separate small squares. (In other words, when you look at any one of the sides, you see a 3x3 pattern of squares, something like a tic-tac-toe design.) There are 54 squares altogether, each of which is colored either red, orange, yellow, white, green or blue. The cube is designed so that any of the sides can be rotated. Each time you rotate a side, the orientation of its squares change, forming a new pattern of colors. To start the puzzle, you maneuver the sides so that the colors form no particular pattern. To "solve" the puzzle, you must rotate the sides until each one is composed of squares that are all the same color. That is, one side has all red squares; another side has all orange squares; and so on. The puzzle sounds easy but, theoretically, a Rubik's Cube can have 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 (about 43 quintillion) different combinations. Moreover, from any particular starting position, there is no obvious path to a solution. Still, in spite of the difficulty of the problem, it has been proven mathematically that every possible starting position can be solved in 22 moves or fewer. The original puzzle was invented in 1974 by a Hungarian named Erno Rubik. However, it was not until 1980 that the Cube was introduced at European toy fairs, and in the next three years, over 100 million Rubik's Cubes were sold. By 1983 the fad had died out but, over the years, a small core of international Rubik's Cube fanatics have maintained their devotion to the puzzle, and there are now a variety of "official" competitions. The basic test is to see who can solve the puzzle the most quickly. The first world championship was held in June 1982 in Budapest, and the winner was Minh Thai, a Vietnamese student from Los Angeles. Minh solved the puzzle in 22.95 seconds. In the 2003 world championship, the fastest time was 16.53 seconds, by Jess Bonde of Denmark. To put this in perspective, one of my researchers, Donnie, is a Rubik's Cube aficionado: Donnie is about as cool a guy as you could ever hope to meet, and his best time is 30.8 seconds. Web:
Sliding Tile Puzzles Do you remember when you were a kid playing with one of those puzzles with the sliding tiles? You move the tiles around until they are in the correct order (or until you give up in frustration and decide to throw the thing away and go watch TV). Now you can play the same game on the Net. Just one more way in which childhood is becoming electric. Web:
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