Mindbreakers .com - Puzzles and Riddles

A puzzle is a problem or enigma presented as entertainment; that is written down, acted out, etc. Many puzzles stem from serious mathematical or logistical problems (see packing problems and tour puzzles). Others (like chess problems) are derived from board games. Others again have been devised for the purpose of being brain teasers.

The history of puzzles goes back thousands of years, Tangram being one of the earliest and still one of the most popular puzzles. In certain temples of Japan monks used to write mathematical puzzles on temple walls.

A riddle is a puzzle, consisting of text with a question to answer. Riddles have a distinguished literary ancestry, although the contemporary sort of conundrum that passes under the name of “riddle” may not make this obvious. Riddles occur extensively in Old English poetry, and also in the Old Norse literature of the Elder Edda and the skalds. A manuscript in Old English, The Exeter Book, preserves almost sixty versified riddles from the Old English literature.

A general technique is to obliquely refer to the subject by kenning and other sorts of figurative language; since kennings formed such an important element of alliterative verse forms in the Germanic languages, the riddles served the dual purpose of puzzling the poet’s audience and teaching the lore needed to successfully use or understand the poetic language. The god Odin was a master of riddle lore, and sparred with several of his foes using contests of riddles. In the Vafthruthnismal, Odin defeats his foe by posing a question only he could possibly know the answer to.

In Hebrew Bible, the hero Samson proposes a riddle to the Philistines, which centered around Samson’s discovery of honey in the carcass of a lion. (Judges 14) In Greek mythology, riddles were the province of the Sphinx, a female monster who challenged passersby with riddles; those who failed to guess them were devoured. She famously asked Oedipus, “What is the animal that goes about on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three in the evening?” The correct answer given by Oedipus was “Man,” who crawls as a baby, walks upright as an adult, and goes with the help of a walking stick when elderly.

In J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Gollum challenges Bilbo Baggins to a riddle competition; Bilbo wins the competition by asking Gollum, “What have I got in my pocket?”, which Gollum could not answer. The answer, of course, was the One Ring, which Gollum had lost and Bilbo had since found.

In the Batman comic books, one of the hero’s best known enemies is The Riddler who is personally compelled to supply clues about his upcoming crimes to his enemies in the form of riddles and puzzles. Stereotypically, they are the kind of simple riddles as described below, but modern treatments generally prefer to have the character use more sophisticated puzzles.

Contemporary riddles typically use puns and double entendres for humorous effect, rather than to puzzle the butt of the joke.

The source of this article is Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

A game is a recreational activity involving one or more players. This can be defined by either a goal that the players try to reach, or some set of rules that determines what the players can or can not do. Games are played primarily for entertainment or enjoyment, but may also serve as exercise or in an educational, simulational or psychological role.

Monopoly is the best selling board game in history. It is available in localized versions in many nations, such as this one in German.Although many animals play, only humans confirmably have games. Whether some animals are intelligent enough to game is debatable, though a game has ritualistic elements (such as rules and procedures) that are voluntarily acted upon, rather than as a result of instinct. The existence of rules and criteria that decide the outcome of games imply that games require intelligence of a significant degree of sophistication.

Non-human animal species may, however, engage in games whose rules and sophistication may be of such a nature as to be incapable of detection by humans in their present state of knowledge. It would, for example, seem incongruous that large brained species such as many Cetaceans and the larger hominids did not play games. Our inability to observe and understand such games should not be taken as a confirmation that they do not exist. Some courtship displays by some species of bird, such as the Black Grouse, appear to have a component which, from an anthropolgical view, might appeare to be a game in which there are clearly winners and losers.

Games can involve one player acting alone, or two or more players acting cooperatively. Most often involve competition among two or more players. Taking an action that falls outside the rules generally constitutes a foul or cheating.

All through human history, people have played games to entertain themselves and others. There are an enormous variety of games; for specific information about different types of games, see the links at the end of this article.

Philosopher David Kelley, in his popular introductory reasoning text The Art of Reasoning, defines the concept “game” as “a form of recreation constituted by a set of rules that specify an object to be attained and the permissible means of attaining it.” This covers most cases well, but does not quite fit with things like war games and sports , which often are not played for entertainment but to build skills for later use.

Games in philosophy. In Philosophical Investigations, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that the concept “game” could not be contained by any single definition, but that games must be looked at as a series of definitions that share a “family resemblance” to one another. Games were important to Wittgenstein’s later thought; he held that language was itself a game, consisting of tokens governed by mutually agreed upon rules that governed the usage of words.

Stanley Fish, looking for a clear example of the sorts of social constructions, cited the balls and strikes of baseball as example. While the strike zone target is governed by the rules of the game, it epitomizes the category of things that exist only because people have agreed to treat them as real. No pitch is a ball or a strike until it has been labelled as such by an appropriate authority, the plate umpire, whose judgment on this matter cannot be challenged within the current game.

Many technical fields are often applied to the study of games, including probability, statistics, economics, ethnomathematics, and game theory.

The source of this article is Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

An intelligence quotient or IQ is a score derived from a set of standardized tests developed to measure a person’s cognitive abilities (”intelligence”) in relation to their age group. IQ tests do not measure intelligence the way a ruler measures height (absolutely), but rather the way a race measures speed (relatively). Also, IQ tests measure actual performance, not innate potential. For people living in the prevailing conditions of the developed world, IQ is highly heritable, and by adulthood the influence of family environment on IQ is undetectable.

IQ test scores are correlated with measures of brain structure and function, as well as performance on simple tasks that anyone can complete within a few seconds. IQ is strongly correlated with academic success, but can also predict important life outcomes such as job performance, socioeconomic advancement, and “social pathologies”. Recent work has demonstrated links between IQ and health, longevity, and functional literacy.

History. Alfred Binet and his colleague Theodore Simon created the Binet-Simon scale in 1905, which used testing to identify students who could benefit from extra help in school. Their assumption was that lower scores indicated the need for more teaching, not an inability to learn. This interpretation is still held by some modern experts.

Notably, Binet himself made no claim that his test properly measured intelligence. He stated in his paper New Methods for the Diagnosis of the Intellectual Level of Subnormals that

“This scale properly speaking does not permit the measure of the intelligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured, but are on the contrary, a classification, a hierarchy among diverse intelligences; and for the necessities of practice this classification is equivalent to a measure.”

In 1910, Henry H. Goddard proposed three categories for the “feeble-minded” based on IQ scores: moron (IQ of 51-70), imbecile (IQ of 26-50), and idiot (IQ of 0-25). This taxonomy was the standard of intelligence research for decades.

In 1916, Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman released the “Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon Scale”, generally known as the Stanford-Binet test. This became the most commonly administered test for many decades. The term “intelligence quotient,” in which each student’s score was the quotient of his or her tested mental age with his or her actual age, was adopted by Terman from a 1912 proposal by German psychologist William Stern. This led to refined testing developed by Robert Yerkes for United States Army recruits.

Today, the most commonly administered IQ test is the WISC-III test, originally developed by David Wechsler in 1974. The WISC-III test comprises ten types of problems, categorized by difficulty and by skill type (verbal and performance scales). A revised version, the WISC-IV, was released in 2003 and is used regularly in assessments. However, the interpretation of various combinations of subscales is still being researched. Another notable type of IQ test is the Bailey Scale of Infant Development, regarded as the ‘best’ means of testing cognitive development in infants.

Online Tests. Although online IQ tests have become wildly popular with the explosion of the internet in recent years, they are highly inaccurate. Comparing results among a large set of people shows a common factor: most scores are above 110. However, 100 is the average score for an IQ test by definition, in addition online IQ tests do not create an equal distribution of scores both above and below the average. Of course, such tests automatically measure very few people in the 70 to 90 range, and hence create a strong upward distortion. Many of these websites do not show the results immediately and instead attempt to sell certificates showing the results.

The SAT and its cousin, the GRE, are two tests that have been shown to correlate highly with IQ. Therefore, for those who wish to obtain a general idea of their IQ scores, without taking an offical IQ test, it is recommended that they take the GRE online and use a conversion formula, which can be found by typing in the following keywords in a search engine such as Google: IQ, GRE, conversion. More accurate results can be obtained if you take a few days to study for the GRE first.

The source of this article is Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

A quiz is a form of game or puzzle in which the players (as individuals or in teams), attempt to answer questions correctly. Quizzes may be on a variety of subjects (general knowledge, ‘pot luck’) or subject-specific. The format of the quiz can also vary widely. The term quizzed cannot, and should not under any circumstances be used in the context of a police interrogation.

Quizes: Pub quizzes Quizbowl Canada Reach for the Top United States College Bowl National Academic Quiz Tournaments Academic Competition Federation United Kingdom Buzzerquiz University Challenge (televised) Quiz board games Trivial Pursuit Quiz leagues Quiz machines TV quizzes (Game shows TV/Radio) Jeopardy! Who Wants to be a Millionaire The Weakest Link BBC’s MasterMind Quizzing in India Some quizzes are multiple choice. A popular strategy on these quizzes is to cross out all the obviously wrong choices, and pick the best of the remaining options.

In education, a quiz usually has fewer questions of lesser difficulty and requires less time for completion than a test or exam.

Additionally, a quiz may be a series of multiple-choice questions about the respondent without right or wrong answers. The responses to these questions are tallied according to a key, and the result purports to reveal some quality of the respondent. This kind of “quiz” was originally popularized by women’s magazines such as Cosmopolitan. They have since become common online, where the result page typically includes code which can be added to a blog entry to publicize the result. These postings are common on LiveJournal.

There are also many online quizzes, many webmasters have quiz sections on their websites and forums, phpBB2 has one MOD (Modification) which allows users to submit quizzes, this is the Ultimate Quiz MOD.

The source of this article is Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.