Let’s go on to your next book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. This won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. Can you explain what it’s about and how it relates to puzzles? Four kids were presented with jigsaw puzzles with different sizes and subjects. Try to find out which puzzle they received. Four baseball players played on different teams last season but are now playing together. Find out which was their previous team. In our new series of videos, you can learn about new puzzle types and take part in quizzes. Why not have a watch?

Let’s go on to Masquerade by Kit Williams, which is an armchair treasure hunt. This was a big deal, I think. To me, part of what I love about puzzles is that they fuel my curiosity and I’d say curiosity and gratitude are my two favorite virtues. My last book was about gratitude; this book is all about curiosity. Curiosity is what drives puzzlers. They’re like, ‘Why is it? What is it?’ There’s a great puzzler, Maki Kaji, who is called the godfather of Sudoku. He summarized puzzles in three symbols: the question mark, the forward arrow, and the exclamation point. The question mark is when you first see a puzzle, and you’re baffled; the arrow is the struggle for solutions, the exploration; and then the exclamation point is that aha moment. He said you have to embrace the arrow; you have to love the search. It’s a more poetic way of saying you have got to embrace the journey. So that’s another thing I love about puzzles, that search. Palmer MD. Keep Your Brain Alive: 83 Neurobic Exercises to Help Prevent Memory Loss and Increase Mental Fitness, by Lawrence Katz and Manning Rubin. Activities, Adaptation & Aging. 2016;40(1):80-80. doi:10.1080/01924788.2016.1144015.Four competitors won different prizes on different days on a TV game show. Who won the biggest prize?

Yes. I cast a very wide net of types of puzzles. My first love is crosswords and word puzzles. But there are also logic puzzles, Sudoku, and puzzle types I never even knew about but that are huge, like Japanese puzzle boxes. I was able to find these subcultures where people are obsessed with them, where it’s like a religion. They are as devoted to it as religious people are to their various denominations. What I loved was meeting people like Elonka, or the guy who solves the Rubik’s cube with his feet in less than 20 seconds. There are just so many characters who are delightfully weird and eccentric. It was so fun to explore not only the history of puzzles, but who these people are and why they love puzzles so much. I read this book in college and I understood about 40% of it. I just looked at it again and maybe got up to 50% or 60%. It’s a dense book but it’s very playful. It’s hard to describe. It’s part history, part puzzles, and a lot of philosophy. His goal is to try to explain how a bunch of lifeless atoms can create consciousness. He uses all sorts of interesting metaphors. The atoms are like a colony of ants. The atoms in our brain are like meaningless letters, but you put them together and they gain meaning. There’s the idea that when you boil it down, some things are just axiomatic and don’t make sense except within the system. Part of the book is dialogues between Achilles and a tortoise. So it’s a very strange book but it’s full of delightful little nuggets. They don’t call it a treasure hunt. They call it a ‘puzzle hunt.’ But it is very similar. Going to the MIT Mystery Hunt was one of the adventures in my book. It’s where I met the people who wrote the puzzles for my contest. It’s a crazy annual event. It’s like an ironman triathlon for nerds. It’s 2,000 of the smartest people you can imagine, who come to Boston to the campus of MIT and spend 72 hours solving about 150 of the hardest, most baffling puzzles you can imagine. It’s a team competition and the team that finds the penny on the MIT campus wins. Four students from abroad chose to study in universities from the UK. Figure out where each student is going to study. Four kids rode their bikes to deliver newspapers. Figure out how many newspapers each kid delivered.Calm Puzzles: More than 50 puzzles, including word searches, snakewords, word finders and wordwheels, to promote calm and mindfulness Yes, the record is 3.5 seconds. It’s just mind-boggling. I can’t even twist it twice in 3.5 seconds.

The Greek and Roman gods were basically the same, they just had different names. Try to figure out which Greek god was the god of poetry. We sent probes to space to "visit" our neighbor planets and take a look at their moons. Which planet has more moons? Four drivers are filling their cars at a gas station. Can you find out how many gallons were filled by pump number 4?Logic puzzles come in all shapes and sizes, but the kind of puzzles we offer here are most commonly referred to as "logic grid" puzzles. In each puzzle you are given a series of categories, and an equal number of options within each category. Each option is used once and only once. Your goal is to figure out which options are linked together based on a series of given clues. Each puzzle has only one unique solution, and each can be solved using simple logical processes (i.e. educated guesses are not required). There are four travelers waiting for their flights at the airport. Who will be the first to depart? So, in your book, you tried to visit people who are very, very involved with basically every single type of puzzle you could think of?

Four young soccer players are transferring from Brazil to Italy. What is the position of the youngest player? I know. You can see all the tragedy but also the triumphs. You can see it all in the history of ciphers. So I’m a big fan. It’s a fun book. During World War II, the belligerent nations deployed their best aircrafts. Find out which is the ID number of the German aircraft.

Giant monsters are menacing cities all over the world. Which city is the biggest monster destroying? So first on your list is My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles by Martin Gardner. The publisher blurb suggests these are puzzles 9- to 12-year-olds can do so, hopefully, most people can manage them. Tell me a bit about this book. A custom-labeled grid is provided for every puzzle, like the one you see to the right. The grid allows you to cross-reference every possible option in every category. You can eliminate pairs you know aren't true with an X, and pencil in pairs you know are related with an O. If you know, for example, that Lauren wasn't born in 1961, you can add an X in the box where the Lauren column and 1961 row meet. Similarly, if you know that Bryant was born in 1971, you can add an O in the appropriate box. Furthermore, since every option can only be used once in any given puzzle, you can eliminate the four other options for Bryant in that category (1937, 1946, 1961, 1975) and the four other options for 1971 (Anahi, Jayden, Lauren and Nikolas). Four tourists rented their carnival costume in a "sestiere" of Venice. Which costume was rented in San Polo? Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount.