I’ve said more than once that I’ve loved all 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 approaches, break the setup down into its components clearly, and be able to build logical chains. I got lucky: in school I was taught that by a wonderful math teacher, and later I kept solving things like that myself, whatever I could get my hands on.
Sometimes video games include puzzles like this too. For example, in Dishonored 2, in one episode a gate is locked with a code, and you can figure it out by solving a logic puzzle. The developers also give you a workaround — you can use force or stealth to get the hints from other characters and skip the brainteaser. But I couldn’t resist and spent almost 40 minutes solving it: to my own delight, once I did, I entered the code correctly on the first try. For that I got a separate achievement in the game, but the main pleasure was the solving itself.
But let’s get back to the book. Can You Solve My Problems? by Alex Bellos is another book by a lover of this kind of puzzle, who collected them into a book not with some goal of teaching people to think outside the box (as in the Gareth Moore book mentioned above), but simply to entertain the reader.
The author also spends quite a bit of time explaining how this or that puzzle came about (or where it was found), what interpretations existed, and other interesting details. First he presents the puzzle, and then he lays out various bits of information about it and possible ways to solve it. Sometimes he goes overboard, taking away your chance to figure it out yourself if you decide to keep reading the description.
And the full solution can be found at the end of the book, where the correct approaches are collected and, of course, the answers to every puzzle in the book. And it’s not just an answer — it’s a description of how to get there, how the solution is built. Sometimes there can even be several solutions, and the author shows different approaches.
And although I said at the beginning that I love logic puzzles, it’s actually pretty rare to come across puzzles that are purely about logic. Same here. The book is divided into five sections: logic puzzles proper, geometry, practical puzzles (based on situations from the world around us), puzzles with objects, and number games.
Overall, it’s a decent book — lots of interesting puzzles — but some of them are spoiled by sloppy wording and outright mistakes. I read the Russian translation, but I deliberately compared some of the puzzles with the original text. Sometimes the problem is in the original, and sometimes it’s specifically a translation error.
For example, in the The Good, the Bad and the Ugly puzzle, the setup is phrased in such a way that I, as someone who thinks in terms of logic, didn’t even consider the “correct” answer — because the wording clearly says “who he must shoot.” That could have been fixed by changing it to “how he must shoot” or “where he must shoot.” But if it’s “who,” then to me it’s unambiguous that you can’t shoot into the air. And the correct answer is precisely “into the air.” And the original has the same wording problem.
And in the puzzle about the five houses (the one with the zebra), the mistake is specifically in the Russian translation, in how the conditions are phrased. It leads you to conclude that the puzzle has no solution at all. And only reading the solution showed that one of the conditions is being interpreted differently. That’s exactly when I checked the original. Here’s the condition in Russian, and the same one in English:
- Russian, literal translation: “The neighbor of the person who wears sandals lives in the house next to the person who keeps a fox.”
- Original: “The person who wears Birkenstocks lives in the house next to the person with the fox.”
As you can see, the first part of the sentence is different — and it changes the condition completely.
Another error of the same kind shows up in the puzzle titled “How many zeros are in the number 100?!” The Russian editor swapped the exclamation mark and the question mark to match Russian punctuation rules, but in the original the “100!?” isn’t written that way for nothing — because 100! is a factorial. Sorry for the spoilers. If you write it as “100?!”, the whole trick disappears — along with the puzzle itself.
Overall, as long as the book stuck to pure logic puzzles (the first of the five sections), I was interested — even with the mistakes. But I skimmed and solved the other sections quickly, more out of inertia. It got frankly boring.
I don’t regret reading it, but the rating is pretty low.
My rating: 2.5/5
