I am a huge fan of all sorts of puzzles, with a special fondness for logic puzzles with a mathematical flair as well as word and grid puzzles. Interviews for quantitative trading jobs are full of these sorts of brainteasers, which is one reason I love the industry so much.
I’m also a huge escape room enthusiast, having been to 60+ with my friends over the last decade and a bit. I sometimes run organised “escape rooms” or puzzle hunts with original puzzles: for example I hosted a dinner party during which I remotely cut the lights and pretended to be shot, leading to a trail of clues for guests to reveal my murderer.
Not all of these are original puzzles, though sadly I don’t remember the sources for most of them, having heard them years ago.
Logic Puzzles
These are puzzles in a clearly defined environment, usually based on deducing a unique answer satisfying a set of logical constraints. These puzzles are often considered the “purest”: there is no trickery and the solution is always possible to get using only the answer in the question.
- A difficult puzzle based on finding ten numbers which answer ten interlinked questions.
State Exploration
These are puzzles in which you are in a fixed ideal environment with some latent unknown variable, and must find an algorithm to deduce the variable given a set of exploratory actions.
- Deduce the number of carriages while trapped on a circular train.
Strategy Finding
Given a competitive game with fixed rules, can you find a strategy to always win? Given a cooperative setup with limited communication bandwidth, can you find a strategy to always win with your partner?
- 🚧 None to see here yet! Check back soon.
Optimisation
A subgenre of strategy finding games where you have to find some sort of strategy to maximise your winnings or show something is possible, but you’re not playing against anyone and don’t need to communicate anything with your choices.
- The famous 12 coins puzzle and some bonus puzzles based on it.
Probability
This is one of my favourite areas of mathematics, so there’s no surprise a lot of puzzles are about probability. These are often about estimating the probability or expected value of some event given information.
- Some easy introductory puzzles about anthropics.
- A puzzle about cracking five locks by pure chance.
- The Monty Hall problem and some variants thereof.
Number Puzzles
These are often mathematical puzzles which rely on numbers: frequently of the genre “find a number which satisfies all of a list of constraints”.
- A trivia-style quiz where you sort numbers in the form of cryptic clues.
Other Mathematical Puzzles
This is for other puzzles which rely on more advanced mathematics to solve. These may be about higher dimensional thinking, integration, or otherwise require abstract thinking.
- 🚧 None to see here yet! Check back soon.
Word Puzzles
This section contains puzzles related to matching patterns in words, arranging letters, finding words which meet constraints, and other related things.
- Bracket City, a clone of the original so that I can make and share my own.
Miscellaneous
This is for any other type of puzzle, or things which are only really puzzles in a loose sense, which don’t belong in any other section but nonetheless deserve a mention on this page.
- 🚧 None to see here yet! Check back soon.