Does Interest in Solving Puzzles Help?

Does Interest in Solving Puzzles Help?

I do not even know that solving a puzzle helps anyone in anyway whatsoever. But, I am wondering if we assumed that puzzles do help, what manner of help that would be.

Would it be a slow and steady realization, the result of systematic working it out? Or, would it be the so-called Eureka moment? Osmosis, perhaps? Would new links between what we thought of as distinct pathways spring forth suddenly? Would a serendipitous solution to a puzzle help? Does visualization help in solving non-visual puzzle help? Or, its converse?Would stating a puzzle to others trigger a line of thought leading to the solution? Does a puzzle take your mind off a nagging thought in one’s mind, and in the process declutter the mind?

My considered opinion is a puzzle helps in many ways, jointly or severally (that is the language one finds in a contract!). There is a puzzle called Magic Squares. This engaged me and my friends in high school, ninth or tenth standard; not merely 3x3 squares but higher orders. like 5x5, 7x7. My friend got it from someone but would not reveal to me the patternfor the 3x3 Magic square. Yes, the word, pattern. This pattern almost repeats itself for the 5x5, 7x7 and on up. 

I set about finding it, only for the 3x3 but could not. One day, out of the blue, the logic appeared to me magically. It was all a matter of, for 3x3, filling up each of the square with a number between one and nine, after pencilling in five in the central square. The clue is in fixing logically the central square for the digit five. Now, the pattern made sense to me! I could easily do any odd-numbered Magic square!

Even prior to that, when I was in the eighth standard, my father showed me the famous Seven Bridges of Knigsberg Problem that Leonard Euler found the surprising answer to. My father uncharacteristically reduced the illustration to a simple line diagram. The challenge was to draw the line diagram without taking the pencil off the slate (yes, I was using slate in those days) and not re-tracing any line segment. I did not sweat over it, and got the answer−the task cannot be accomplished!−in very few tries. On my own I thought further and checked my line of thinking with a number of line diagrams I took from a book of puzzles, tried the alternatives and I knew that my logic held good, in every case.

I do not want this post to be a long line of how I solved this puzzle, that puzzle and so on. The last sentence about my own addiction to solving puzzles (and failing more often than not) in this post is that it came to me as trying to connect the dots.

If your toddler at a restaurant wants to try to trace the path to the money bag in a puzzle, let her do that. It may enable her to look at the details as well as the overall puzzle simultaneously, if not at the first try, but definitely subsequently! She needs no help from you.

Or, find the six differences between two seemingly identical sketches, appreciate it. If a pre-teen (but double digit aged) wants to unjumble a set of letters to form a word, that is the brain of a pre-adult engaging itself with the world outside of his home, school and friends, learning what an anagram is. Encourage that. Solving the daily newspaper crossword puzzle lights million light bulbs in the brain, most definitely.

Railway shunting yard problems offer fantastic opportunities to convert images to algebraic manipulation and do the reverse too, with and without additional complications. Isn’t this analogous to what is done in using transforms in math, like Laplace transform, Fourier transform?

To answer the title query, YES!

Raghuram Ekambaram