Logic Puzzle

Defining a Logic Puzzle

This article explains what a Logic Puzzle is. A logic puzzle, also known as a logic problem or a logic grid puzzle, is a story of mystery where it's most important character is YOU - the detective! And as with any detective worth their spyglass, you must solve the mystery. For this article, I will look at the logic puzzle "Five Houses".

Logic puzzles have properties such as title, author, humorous image, and number of stars. One star means the puzzle is easy, and five stars means it is very difficult. But the most important property of a logic puzzle are the clues. The clues are usually numbered after the introductory text, but clues may lie in the introduction as well. Please read the text of the puzzle with the following questions in mind.

• What are the objects in the puzzle? These are the Nouns.
• What are the relationships between the nouns? These are the Verbs and Links.
• What are the Facts? These combine the nouns, verbs, and links into static statement.
• What are the Rules? These are conditional statements. Not all puzzles have rules.

Some logic puzzles may not give you all of the nouns. For example, there may be nouns such as the age of people that need to be calculated. In those cases you will need to use Placeholders, and have rules to calculate the age. Logic puzzles that require placeholders are "Dandy Salespeople" and "Astrophysics Conference".

The information needed to solve a logic puzzle are given by the first five tabs at the bottom of the puzzle page: Nouns, Verbs, Links, Facts, and Rules. The remaining tabs are concerned with solving a puzzle: Marks, Chart, Grids, Stats, and Setup.

Solving a Logic Puzzle

The two most important tools for solving a logic puzzle are the Chart and the Grids. The chart displays nouns that are with another noun, while the grids display the verb for each combination of two nouns. Only the grids allow you to manually solve a puzzle. Looking at the Verbs tab, for any cell that contains the possible character (a blank), you can enter either the negative verb 'X', or the positive verb 'O'.

Verbs that are entered into the grids are called Marks which are also displayed in the Marks tab, while positive marks are also displayed in the Chart.

In the Setup tab you can enable the Levels to have the program solve a puzzle. Also, you can enable the Laws to have the program examine the marks entered by you or the program.

There are several factors that determine the difficulty of a puzzle, like the number of nouns and noun types in the puzzle, the number of links between the nouns, the number of facts, and if the puzzle needs rules. And some puzzles that have rules may need you to make Assumptions (aka guess).