Science Tuesday - Puzzles! Puzzles! Puzzles!

CALCULATIONS The scribe of the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, an Egyptian document more than 3,600 years old, introduces the roughly 85 problems by saying that he is presenting the “correct method of reckoning, for grasping the meaning of things and knowing everything that is, obscurities and all secrets.”

Math Puzzles’ Oldest Ancestors Took Form on Egyptian Papyrus
By PAM BELLUCK, The New York Times, December 6, 2010

“As I was going to St. Ives
I met a man with seven wives. ...”
You may know this singsong quiz,

But what you might not know is this:
That it began with ancient Egypt’s
Early math-filled manuscripts.

It’s true. That very British-sounding St. Ives conundrum (the one where the seven wives each have seven sacks containing seven cats who each have seven kits, and you have to figure out how many are going to St. Ives) has a decidedly archaic antecedent.

An Egyptian document more than 3,600 years old, the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, contains a puzzle of sevens that bears an uncanny likeness to the St. Ives riddle. It has mice and barley, not wives and sacks, but the gist is similar. Seven houses have seven cats that each eat seven mice that each eat seven grains of barley. Each barley grain would have produced seven hekat of grain. (A hekat was a unit of volume, roughly 1.3 gallons.)

The goal: to determine how many things are described. The answer: 19,607.

The Rhind papyrus, which dates to 1650 B.C., is one of several precocious papyri and other artifacts displaying Egyptian mathematical ingenuity. There is the Moscow Mathematical Papyrus (held at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow), the Egyptian Mathematical Leather Roll (which along with the Rhind papyrus is housed at the British Museum) and the Akhmim Wooden Tablets (at the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo).

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On a Hunt for What Makes Gamers Keep Gaming
By JOHN TIERNEY, The New York Times, December 6, 2010

By the age of 21, the typical American has spent 10,000 hours playing computer games, and endured a smaller but much drearier chunk of time listening to sermons about this sinful habit. Why, the experts wail, are so many people wasting their lives solving meaningless puzzles in virtual worlds?

Now some other experts — ones who have actually played these games — are asking more interesting questions. Why are these virtual worlds so much more absorbing than school and work? How could these gamers’ labors be used to solve real-world puzzles? Why can’t life be more like a video game?

“Gamers are engaged, focused, and happy,” says Edward Castronova, a professor of telecommunications at Indiana University who has studied and designed online games. “How many employers wish they could say that about even a tenth of their work force?

“Many activities in games are not very different from work activities. Look at information on a screen, discern immediate objectives, choose what to click and drag.”

Jane McGonigal, a game designer and researcher at the Institute for the Future, sums up the new argument in her coming book, “Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World.” It’s a manifesto urging designers to aim high — why not a Nobel Prize? — with games that solve scientific problems and promote happiness in daily life.

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Tracing the Spark of Creative Problem-Solving
By BENEDICT CAREY, The New York Times, December 6, 2010

The puzzles look easy, and mostly they are. Given three words — “trip,” “house” and “goal,” for example — find a fourth that will complete a compound word with each. A minute or so of mental trolling (housekeeper, goalkeeper, trip?) is all it usually takes.

But who wants to troll?

Let lightning strike. Let the clues suddenly coalesce in the brain — “field!” — as they do so often for young children solving a riddle. As they must have done, for that matter, in the minds of those early humans who outfoxed nature well before the advent of deduction, abstraction or SAT prep courses. Puzzle-solving is such an ancient, universal practice, scholars say, precisely because it depends on creative insight, on the primitive spark that ignited the first campfires.

And now, modern neuroscientists are beginning to tap its source.

In a just completed study, researchers at Northwestern University found that people were more likely to solve word puzzles with sudden insight when they were amused, having just seen a short comedy routine.

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An 11-Letter Word for Perfectionist? Starts With C
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, December 6, 2010

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Natan Last is making a crossword puzzle.

“The theme,” he says as he opens his laptop, “is Dr. Seuss books” — in particular “Yertle the Turtle,” “Green Eggs and Ham” and “Horton Hears a Who,” whose 15-letter titles will fit exactly across the blank grid he summons onto his screen. He writes one title across near the top, another at the middle and the third near the bottom.

“Now we have to put in the black squares,” he says. By the conventions of crossword making, or “constructing,” the design must be symmetrical. That is, it must look the same upside down as it does right side up.

The trick with black squares is to put them under letters that often end words, like T’s and S’s, says Joey Weissbrot, like Mr. Last a member of the Brown University Puzzling Association (the ambiguity is deliberate). He and some other members of the group have gathered with Mr. Last in a student lounge to collaborate.

A junior at Brown and a creative writing major from Brooklyn, Mr. Last has been making crossword puzzles since he was in high school, and he was, for a time, the youngest constructor ever to have a puzzle in The New York Times. Eventually, The Times’s puzzle editor, Will Shortz, took him on as an intern. His crosswords were “extraordinary,” Mr. Shortz said in an interview, especially for someone so young.

“Crosswords have this reputation of being for older people,” Mr. Shortz went on. “That’s just not true anymore.”

There are similar groups at places like Yale, Harvard, Princeton and Texas Christian University. But Mr. Shortz says Brown’s is the largest, and at Mr. Last’s suggestion he gave it the task of producing a week’s worth of puzzles in September. (Disclosure: This reporter is a Brown alumna and an emerita member of its board.)

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