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Puzzles in Mind and History

A good puzzle, it’s a fair thing. Nobody is lying. It’s very clear, and the problem
depends just on you.
Ernö Rubik (b. 1944)

One of the oldest riddles of recorded history is the Riddle of the Sphinx. In one
widely told version, the Sphinx was a mammoth creature, half human, half
animal, who had enslaved the city of Tebes, stopping all those who dared enter
or leave it. Te Sphinx posed a riddle to all foolish visitors as a mortal challenge.
Tose who were incapable of answering it paid for their ineptitude with their
lives at the hands of the monster. However, if someone were ever able to come up
with the seemingly intractable, yet simple, answer, the Sphinx vowed to destroy
itself:

What creature ambles on four at dawn, two at midday, and three at twilight?

According to legend, it was Oedipus who solved the riddle by answering

“man,” who is the only creature on earth who crawls on all fours in infancy (the
dawn of life), walks upright on two legs as a grown-up (the midday of life), and
ends up walking on three, with the help of a walking stick, in old age (the twilight
of life). Upon hearing the correct answer, the Sphinx jumped from its perch to a
rock outside the city, becoming a lifeless statue. For ridding them of this terrible
beast, the Tebans made Oedipus their king.
Why is this riddle so fascinating, still holding appeal millennia later? For one
thing, it is an ingenious formulation of something that might otherwise escape
attention—the phases of human life are like the phases of a day, implying that we
cannot escape our mortal destiny in the same ineluctable way that the twilight
inevitably comes. Te riddle is a story within a story. Te main one is the Oedipus
legend, which recounts a self-fulflling prophecy. Oedipus had been lef to die on
a mountain by his father Laius, who had been warned by an oracle that he would
be killed by his own son. Te infant Oedipus was saved by a shepherd. Afer
2 An Anthropology of Puzzles

growing up, and learning about his origins, the young Oedipus traveled to Tebes
in search of the truth.Afer solving the Sphinx’s riddle, the Tebans made him the
successor to their murdered king, who, unbeknownst to Oedipus, was his father.
As the new king, Oedipus married Laius’s widow, Jocasta. Several years later, a
plague struck the city. An oracle announced that the scourge would come to an
end only afer Laius’s murderer had been driven from Tebes.Oedipus investigated
the murder and soon realized that Laius was the man he had killed on the road to
Tebes. To his horror, he also discovered that Laius was his father and Jocasta his
mother. Grief-stricken and desperate, Oedipus blinded himself, and Jocasta
hanged herself. Oedipus was banished from Tebes, dying in unendurable woe at
Colonus. Te subtext in this legend is a signifcant one for the purposes of this
book—riddles may be warnings about the realities of the human condition.
Various versions of the Sphinx’s riddle exist. Te one above is paraphrased
from the play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. Whatever its version, it is evidence that,
since the dawn of history, people have devised riddles to understand themselves
and the world around them. Tese might therefore reveal how sentient refective
thought emerged in our species, constituting miniature models of how we grasp
things. Tis chapter provides an overview of the origin, history, and connection
of puzzles to human thought and culture. Te purpose is to argue in an initial
way that puzzles arise from a deep-seated need to ask questions about existence.
Tey do so in their own miniature way, constituting small-scale versions of the
larger-scale questions of philosophy and science.

Riddles, puzzles, and games

Tere is no historical era or culture without riddles. Tey constitute a universal

speech art that cuts across all languages. Tis is perhaps why riddles lose almost
nothing in translation, tapping into common themes of human concern, from
mortality to the meanings of things. Te topic of riddles will be explored in more
detail in the next chapter. Sufce it to say here that we continue to cherish and
appreciate them, no matter who created them or when they were devised. Like
works of visual art, they never lose their aura, being passed on from generation
to generation intact.
Te English word puzzle, as used today, encompasses everything from riddles
and crosswords to Sudoku, optical illusions, and brainteasers in logic and
mathematics. Te word was coined near the end of the sixteenth century, and
applied a little later to describe the jigsaw puzzle. As a generic categorical term,
 Puzzles in Mind and History 3

puzzle is a convenient one for classifying diverse enigmatological artifacts as

singular psychological and anthropological phenomena.
Labeling some ancient riddle or puzzle, therefore, is a retrospective form of
reference. Te concept of problem came out of ancient geometry, where it was
used to refer to a proposition in which some shape or fgure had to be constructed.
From this, the word was extended to cover any mathematical question that
required a specifc kind of answer and a strategy to do so. Many of the ancient
mathematical problems were actually puzzles, as we would name them today.
Te main diference is that the intent of a problem is to produce a specifc and
recognizable answer; the intent of a puzzle, on the other hand, is to hide the
answer, presenting information that appears to be incomplete in some way. Both
problems and puzzles are Q & A (Question and Answer) structures. So, the
diference between the two can be shown diagrammatically as follows:

Problem
Q → A (the question leads directly to an answer)

Puzzle
Q → (A) (the answer to the question is not immediately obvious)

Riddles have the same structure and it is for this reason that they can be called
puzzles, even though there are some key diferences between riddles and other
puzzle inventions (as will be discussed in the next chapter). As the Oedipus story
indicates, riddles were ofen connected to ominous destiny, unlike problems in
geometry. But riddles also had a recreational social function. Te Biblical kings
Solomon and Hiram, for example, organized riddle contests simply for the
pleasure of outwitting each other. Te Greeks included riddles at banquets, as we
might do today at social gatherings, for entertainment reasons. Te Romans
made riddles a central feature of the Saturnalia, a feast that they celebrated over
the winter solstice. So, riddles were conceived both as part of portentous myth,
used by the Greek oracles to cast fortunes, and as part of recreation. Tis dual
function extended throughout the medieval and Renaissance periods. Only by
the eighteenth century, did they lose their divinatory value, becoming mainly
forms of mind-play, included as regular features by newspapers and periodicals.
It was then that famous personages started creating riddles as part of an ever-
expanding leisure culture and as part of a new literary genre. Benjamin Franklin,
for example, composed riddles under the pen name of Richard Saunders for
inclusion in his Poor Richard’s Almanack (frst published in 1732). Te puzzle
section was a factor in the almanac’s unexpected success. In France, no less a
4 An Anthropology of Puzzles

literary fgure than the satirist Voltaire would regularly compose riddles for pure
enjoyment and to challenge or taunt his friends and enemies.
Te Greeks saw riddles as manifestations of mythos—a form of thinking based
on beliefs rather than on logical argumentation. Tey used the term lógos to
describe the latter. Socrates believed that lógos was innate in all human beings,
teaching that everyone had full knowledge of truth within them, and that this a
priori knowledge could be accessed through conscious refection. In the Meno, a
Socratic dialogue written by Plato (2006, originally c. 380 BCE), Socrates leads an
untutored slave to grasp a complicated geometrical problem by getting him to
refect upon the truths hidden within him through a series of questions designed
to elicit specifc answers. From this Q & A mode of dialogue, the concept of
dialectic investigation crystallized, as the art of investigating and discussing the
truth of ideas. Te notion of mythos can be rephrased as “imagination” and lógos
as“reasoning.” As will be argued throughout this book, puzzles involve both modes
of thought, to diferent and varying degrees. If we are given the circumference of a
circle and asked to determine its radius, it is easy to fgure it out if we know the
formula C (circumference) = πr2 (with r = radius). Tis is a simple problem based
on using previous knowledge applied directly to a given situation—the solver can
thus take a shortcut to lógos. Now, by contrast, consider the following, which at frst
glance would seem to suggest a similar kind of problem that can be solved just as
directly. It was devised by Martin Gardner (1994: 14) and is shown in Figure 1.1.
Given the dimensions of the radius OD (6 + 4 = 10), can you calculate the length
of the diagonal AB in rectangle AOBC?

Figure 1.1 Gardner’s diagonal puzzle.

 Puzzles in Mind and History 5

As it turns out, it is impossible to solve it in an analogously straightforward

fashion. So, let’s consider what is known about circles and rectangles from a
diferent perspective. As a hunch, let’s use the information that the diagonals of
a rectangle are equal to each other in length. Tis suggests drawing the other
diagonal (OC) of the rectangle AOBC (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Solution to Gardner’s diagonal puzzle.

By doing this, we can now see that diagonal OC is also a radius of the circle.
We know that radii are equal from an established theorem. Line OBD is a
radius and is equal to 10 (6 + 4), as shown. Since line OC is also a radius it is thus
equal to 10. From this we conclude that the other diagonal, AB, is also equal to
10. Te solution now appears almost magically, rather than routinely—hence the
use of the expression “Aha” to characterize the efect a solution such as this one
might have on us. Te solution thus starts out as imaginative thinking (playing a
hunch) and then ends with reasoning (carrying through on this hunch). It shows,
in other words, a fow from mythos to lógos, not a separation of the two.
Most puzzles, are characterized by this fow, to varying degrees, of course. It is
relevant to note here that imaginative thinking of this kind originates in the
right hemisphere of the brain (the dreaming hemisphere)—a fact that is
especially useful in contemplating the possible relation of puzzles to human
consciousness. Solving a puzzle is very much like a dream where the parts
cohere spontaneously into wholes by themselves. Tere is some archeological
evidence that the diference between waking (consciousness) and dreaming
(unconsciousness) states in antiquity was ofen blurred (Jaynes 1976). Ideas
were believed to come in dreams (the unconscious mind), and they likely still
do, as well-known episodes from mathematics strongly suggest. Te famous
6 An Anthropology of Puzzles

Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan, claimed that his family goddess

would come to him in his dreams and present him with complex mathematical
equations, providing crucial insights that allowed him to complete his eforts.
Similarly, Henri Poincaré (1902) observed that, typically, it was only afer a
period of sleep marked by dreaming that his imagination developed the relevant
insights into the intractable mathematical conundrums that he tried to crack.
As these anecdotes suggest, indirectly, consciousness is to reasoning what
unconsciousness is to imagination. Te solution to Gardner’s puzzle involved a
blend of the two. Trough a hunch, we were able to envision a solution that lay
“hidden behind the curtain,” to use a phrase employed by Poincaré. At that
point, reasoning took over, allowing us to complete the solution.
As another case-in-point, consider the well-known Nine-Dot Puzzle in
Figure 1.3.
Without your pencil leaving the paper, can you draw four straight lines through the
following nine dots?

Figure 1.3 Te Nine-Dot Puzzle.

Tose unfamiliar with this puzzle tend to tackle it by joining up the dots as
if they were located on the perimeter (boundary) of an imaginary square or
fattened box (Figure 1.4).