This showed that common sense had not died out at the county and village level -- though why the unhappy and obviously unbalanced woman was not restrained remains a puzzle.

Although modern scholars have expressed surprise that `` the simple magic square of three '', a mere `` mathematical puzzle '', was able to exert a considerable influence on the minds and imaginations of the cultured Chinese for so many centuries, they could have found most of the answers right within the square itself.

there was much to grok, loose ends to puzzle over and fit into his growing -- all that he had seen and heard and been at the Archangel Foster Tabernacle ( not just cusp when he and Digby had come face to face alone ) why Bishop Senator Boone made him warily uneasy, how Miss Dawn Ardent tasted like a water brother when she was not, the smell of goodness he had incompletely grokked in the jumping up and down and wailing --

# The final piece of the puzzle, thermal transpiration, was theorized by Osborne Reynolds, but first published by James Clerk Maxwell in the last paper before his death in 1879.

The " puzzle " approach was carried even further into ingenious and seemingly impossible plots by John Dickson Carr — also writing as Carter Dickson — who is regarded as the master of the " locked room mystery ", and Cecil Street, who also wrote as John Rhode, whose detective, Dr. Priestley, specialised in elaborate technical devices, while in the US the whodunnit was adopted and extended by Rex Stout and Ellery Queen, among others.

While individual equations present a kind of puzzle and have been considered throughout history, the formulation of general theories of Diophantine equations ( beyond the theory of quadratic forms ) was an achievement of the twentieth century.

In popular culture, this puzzle was the Puzzle No. 142 in Professor Layton and Pandora's Box as one of the hardest solving puzzles in the game, which needed to be unlocked by solving other puzzles first.

The puzzle was originally proposed in 1848 by the chess player Max Bezzel, and over the years, many mathematicians, including Gauss, have worked on this puzzle and its generalized n-queens problem.

If these memories are accurate, then perhaps in 1975 a subtle flaw was introduced into an otherwise commonplace word puzzle.

A somewhat easier ( more symmetrical ) puzzle, the 8 × 8 rectangle with a 2 × 2 hole in the center, was solved by Dana Scott as far back as 1958.

In the New York Times crossword puzzle for June 27, 2012, the clue for an 11-letter word at 37 across was " Complete set of 12 shapes formed by this puzzle's black squares.

Released in late 1983, the game was marketed via the announcement of a cash prize for the first person to solve the puzzle.

The notion of color was necessitated by the puzzle of the.

Originally called the " Magic Cube ", the puzzle was licensed by Rubik to be sold by Ideal Toy Corp. in 1980 via German businessman Tibor Laczi and Seven Towns founder Tom Kremer, and won the German Game of the Year special award for Best Puzzle that year.

Samuel Loyd ( January 30, 1841 – April 10, 1911 ), born in Philadelphia and raised in New York, was an American chess player, chess composer, puzzle author, and recreational mathematician.

This is false — Loyd had nothing to do with the invention or popularity of the puzzle, and in any case the craze was in 1880, not the early 1870s:

The puzzle craze that was created by the 15 Puzzle began in January 1880 in the US and in April in Europe.

The craze ended by July 1880 and Sam Loyd's first article about the puzzle was not published until sixteen years later, January 1896.

It was based on a similar puzzle involving dogs published in 1857.

Hamilton ’ s Icosian Game was a recreational puzzle based on finding a Hamiltonian cycle.

Tetris was inspired by a traditional puzzle game named Pentomino, where players would have to arrange falling blocks into lines without any gaps.

When Minesweeper was released with Windows 95, mainstream audiences embraced using a mouse to play puzzle games.

Fourth place finalist Melissa Jo Hunter received celebrity status after Evan Marriott dumped her when she confessed her admiration by giving him a puzzle and a poem.

Only afterwards did an act like that become meaningless, so that he would puzzle over it for days, whereas at the time it had seemed quite real.

* another name for Nintendo tumbler puzzle

, also known as Bust-a-Move, is a 1994 tile-matching arcade puzzle video game for one or two players created by Taito Corporation.

Many of the most popular books of the Golden Age were written by Agatha Christie, who produced a long series of books featuring her detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, amongst others, and usually including a complex puzzle for the reader to try to unravel.

Independently, these two trends show the form becoming highly artificial — more like a puzzle to solve than a medium for personal poetic expression.

This letter is a puzzle to readers for several reasons.

The eight queens puzzle is an example of the more general n-queens problem of placing n queens on an n × n chessboard, where solutions exist for all natural numbers n with the exception of 2 and 3.

Generating the permutations that are solutions of the eight rooks puzzle and then checking for diagonal attacks further reduces the possibilities to just 40, 320 ( that is, 8 !).

Advancements for this and other toy problems are the development and application of heuristics ( rules of thumb ) that yield solutions to the n queens puzzle at a small fraction of the computational requirements.

N is 8 for eight queens puzzle.

Moore is also remembered for drawing attention to the peculiar inconsistency involved in uttering a sentence such as " It is raining but I do not believe it is raining "-- a puzzle which is now commonly called " Moore's paradox.

" The puzzle arises because it seems impossible for anyone to consistently assert such a sentence ; but there doesn't seem to be any logical contradiction between " It will rain " and " I don't believe that it will rain.

The Gry Puzzle is a popular puzzle that asks for the third English word, other than " angry " and " hungry ," that ends with the letters "- gry.

By typing " HINT " twice the player would open up a screen of possible topics where they could then reveal one hint at a time for each puzzle, just like the books.

* Archer Maclean's Mercury, a puzzle game for the PlayStation Portable

Programmers may deliberately obfuscate code to conceal its purpose ( security through obscurity ) or its logic, in order to prevent tampering, deter reverse engineering, or as a puzzle or recreational challenge for someone reading the source code.

* Quagmire, a 1993 shareware puzzle platformer for Mac designed by Tony Small

Loyd claimed from 1891 until his death in 1911 that he invented the fifteen puzzle, for example writing in the Cyclopedia of Puzzles ( published 1914 ), p. 235:

Loyd first claimed in 1891 that he invented the puzzle, and he continued until his death a 20 year campaign to falsely take credit for the puzzle.