Since childhood, I’ve loved logic puzzles, IQ tests, and other brain teasers. In 2018, I found a book by Gareth Moore called Lateral Logic, which is essentially a collection of tasks aimed at developing thinking skills. The subtitle sums it up: A Puzzling Path to Non-Standard Thinking.
The book is divided into three parts by difficulty level. The first part serves as a warm-up and introduction to this type of puzzle, with examples illustrating the thought process needed to solve them. Then, it gets harder, with the third part reserved for masters of the craft. Each puzzle includes several hints that don’t give away the answer directly but are meant to steer you in the right direction.
It sounds like paradise for enthusiasts like me. And at first, I did enjoy it. But as I progressed, doubts started to creep in, certain puzzles began to irritate me, and by the end of the book, I had solidified my mixed feelings about its content.
There are definitely some interesting puzzles in the book that are fun to work through. Some I was already familiar with or knew the approaches, thanks to skills I’d developed long ago. But overall, the book didn’t really resonate with me, leaving my final rating rather low. So, why is that?
The book claims a structured approach: easy, medium, hard. However, within this structure, the tasks themselves seem scattered without any attempt to unify their logic. There are purely mathematical problems where the main challenge is figuring out what exactly is being asked, but ultimately, it’s just a matter of calculating correctly. There are also formal logic problems, which aren’t actually difficult if you grasp the basic principles of cause and effect. My math and logic teacher had us work on similar problems back in grades 8 and 9.
Then there’s a separate set of tasks where there’s no “wrong” answer at all—like “draw something.” I started skipping these right from the second one. My imagination is fine, but “what might be drawn on this blank sheet” just doesn’t feel like a real task.
There are also a few puzzles where either something was lost in translation (I read the book in Russian), or they are overly contrived. For example, “well, with enough imagination, you could explain anything.”
Some wording is also misleading, as it can be read in multiple ways. For instance, the phrase, “One person is definitely lying,” reads like “at least one person is lying,” rather than “only one person is lying,” which is what the task actually intends. And for logic problems (which this one is), these subtleties are very important. I suspect that the translator and editor are partly responsible for this (I wasn’t able to compare it to the English version). In some cases, the task’s setup and solution contradict each other (like asking for three ribbons of each color, but then the solution involves three ribbons of one single color).
In other cases, where the solution already seems absurd to the average person (like a probability puzzle), the author provides only a superficial explanation, which only adds to the confusion. Meanwhile, even Wikipedia offers a visual and clearer explanation that would have been more effective if the goal was to teach and clarify.
I was disappointed that the book doesn’t feel cohesive; instead, it seems as if the author simply pulled together interesting bits from various places: some IQ test questions, a few ideas picked up in an origami club, and even “invent something because the publisher’s paying me for the word count.” Or it’s like childhood riddles, where the answer isn’t always obvious. How would anyone guess that “dancing in a hole” refers to a key in a keyhole? It’s like those riddles from my childhood—why is “the same color in winter and summer” a pine tree, not a crocodile?
And the hints are often useless since they merely repeat the task itself. What’s the point? I can read; I’m not dense.
This book disappointed me, though a few puzzles were interesting.
Моя оценка: 2/5
[…] kinds of logic puzzles since childhood. For example, back when I wrote a review of Gareth Moore’s Lateral Logic five years ago. To solve puzzles like these, you really just need to understand the general […]