The Puzzle Instinct: The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life

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Summary: The Puzzle Is: Why Puzzles?
Review: Twenty-five years ago, there was a boom in sales of a fist-sized ingenious contraption of plastic, a fractured cube of multi-colored sides, the pieces of which could be twisted so that all the six faces had different colors (easy) or back to the one configuration where each face had only its own color (hard). The ubiquitous Rubik's Cube came and went (well, it is a puzzle classic in its simplicity; you can still buy it, but the fad is gone), but there will be some other puzzle fad not long from now. The urge to figure out puzzles seems to be as ingrained in human personality as the urge to make language or art. In _The Puzzle Instinct: The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life_ (Indiana University Press), Marcel Danesi, a professor of semiotics and anthropology, tries to figure out the meta-puzzle: life has lots of mysteries and complications. Why should we want to manufacture more?

Danesi's book turns out to be a spirited review of puzzle history, and the history is a long one. The _Ahmes Papyrus_, nearly four thousand years old, is one of the earliest surviving documents of civilization anywhere, and is essentially a series of mathematical puzzles. It is significant that its title is _Directions for Attaining Knowledge of All Dark Things_. Charlemagne, the founder of the Holy Roman Empire, had a puzzle-maker on staff, and King Louis XIII of France had a Royal Anagrammatist. A description of Rubik's Cube is included, of course, as well as many other puzzle fads. The popularity of crossword puzzles is undimmed since they were introduced in the _New York World_ in 1913; the original one is reproduced here. Crosswords became an overnight sensation, and many people still have to do their crossword puzzle every day. Anyone familiar with puzzle literature will find much familiar here; classics like the Towers of Hanoi, magic squares (the best one is by Benjamin Franklin), the River-Crossing Puzzle, and various optical illusions are all included. The puzzle that gives us the exhortation "Think outside the box" is here, as is the four-color map theorem, Archimedes's Cattle Problem, cryptograms, and tangrams. No one reading this book could deny that making and solving puzzles is a universal human trait.

But why? Danesi finally comes to no certain conclusion, but there are some good reasons that he presents. One is that all of us enjoy the "Aha!" experience, the inexplicable flash of insight that can present an answer to something the likes of which we have never before encountered. Puzzles are escapism, but of a peculiar form invoking anxiety and curiosity after the puzzle is presented and pleasurably relieved only by finding the solution (or looking in the answer section). The most satisfactory answer is that like pure science, solving puzzles has been good for us. It is certainly true that working on puzzles is pleasurable, and can be instructive for the individuals trying to figure them out. In a larger sense (and this is a theme presented repeatedly here), puzzles have sparked mathematical revolutions. When Euler set out to solve the Königsberg bridge problem (citizens had known they could not walk around the river town crossing each bridge once and only once), he invented networks, and this eventually became topology. The paradoxes of Zeno (such as the runner being unable to reach the end of a race because he first has to go halfway, and then half of the remaining course, and then half of that, ad infinitum) were a spur for developing the concepts of limits and calculus. When Bertrand Russell tried logically to resolve his barber paradox (If a village barber shaves all and only those villagers who do not shave themselves, does he shave himself?), the resolutions themselves had paradoxes, and only Gödel's famous Incompleteness Theorem showed that full resolutions would be forever impossible. Puzzles are good for us, and this collection provides plenty to think about.