Games for Your Mind: The History and Future of Logic Puzzles by Jason Rosenhouse (PDF)

Description

A lively and engaging look at logic puzzles and their role in mathematics, philosophy, and recreationLogic puzzles were first introduced to the public by Lewis Carroll in the late nineteenth century and have been popular ever since. Games like Sudoku and Mastermind are fun and engrossing recreational activities, but they also share deep foundations in mathematical logic and are worthy of serious intellectual inquiry. Games for Your Mind explores the history and future of logic puzzles while enabling you to test your skill against a variety of puzzles yourself.In this informative and entertaining book, Jason Rosenhouse begins by introducing readers to logic and logic puzzles and goes on to reveal the rich history of these puzzles. He shows how Carroll’s puzzles presented Aristotelian logic as a game for children, yet also informed his scholarly work on logic. He reveals how another pioneer of logic puzzles, Raymond Smullyan, drew on classic puzzles about liars and truthtellers to illustrate Kurt Gödel’s theorems and illuminate profound questions in mathematical logic. Rosenhouse then presents a new vision for the future of logic puzzles based on nonclassical logic, which is used today in computer science and automated reasoning to manipulate large and sometimes contradictory sets of data.Featuring a wealth of sample puzzles ranging from simple to extremely challenging, this lively and engaging book brings together many of the most ingenious puzzles ever devised, including the “Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever,” metapuzzles, paradoxes, and the logic puzzles in detective stories.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐A great book about the history of logics, enjoyed the whole time reading it. So many funny logic puzzles to tease your mind!

⭐This is a strange book. Much of it consists of logical puzzles, beginning with a miscellaneous selection including Sudoku and a chess problem, then moving on to problems in categorical logic devised by Lewis Carroll and ending with a species of problem invented by Raymond Smullyan to illustrate Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems. These last involve Knights who always tell the truth and Knaves who never do, so if a Knave says a Knight is lying then …..etc I found the first set interesting, the second set pointless, and the Knight/Knave problems simply irritating. Interleaved with the problems are chapters on the philosophy and history of logic. In the chapter on Aristotle we are invited to sneer at him for being boring, and advised to skim over the chapter quickly just to get the idea of how pedantic philosophy can be compared with “math, which is fun. I’ve given the book three stars as a compromise, because although I hated it I can appreciate that many people will love it.

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