I’ve been doing prison ministry for some time now (writing letters to inmates) and many of them are intelligent brains being wasted behind bars. One wants tough, fun riddles and puzzles to solve.
What are some riddles or puzzles that are genuinely tough and intellectual; so hard they’d take days? (Must be fun too, no Einstein math)
Rather than list individual puzzles, I’ll list some sources.
NPR’s Sunday Puzzles vary in difficulty. Occasionally I can solve them within seconds. More often I never find the solution. In the middle are the ones that take an hour or two to figure out, or a couple of days of mulling them over. If you follow that link, you’ll find an archive of puzzles. There’s a button for a transcript; the challenge for the week appears near the end of the transcript. These are mostly word puzzles, lots of anagrams and puns and the like. Sample (on the very easy side):
Car Talk Puzzlers are similar puzzles, but are more logic puzzles or creative-solution puzzles. A lot of them were car-related, but a lot weren’t.
A sample:
Finally, Fivethirtyeight’s “The Riddler”. These are often pretty math-heavy, and even though the math they involve is generally high-school math and below, I confess I rarely can figure them out. But there are a lot of puzzles there and may be worth checking out.
If you’re willing to shell out, buy a copy of the GCHQ puzzle book. You can also check out www.pandamagazine.com a bimonthly magazine with an emphasis on MIT Mystery Hunt style puzzles. Both are very good quality and will keep you busy for a long time.
If the person knows how to play chess, retrograde analysis problems can be very absorbing. You don’t have to play well, you just need to know the rules. They’re basically logic problems revolving around how to legally get into various bizarre chess positions.
Once I read the OP, I immediately thought of a logic puzzle that I encountered when I was about 13. I eventually solved it, but it took me about three or four weeks to do so (hey, I had school and homework and sports, so I couldn’t do it full-time). Still, it’s the most challenging logic puzzle that I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve done many. It’s known as “the Zebra Puzzle,” or sometimes as, “Who Owns the Zebra?” Wikipedia has it:
You could swap out the cigarettes for something more innocent like cookies (“The Oreo eater drinks orange juice,” or “The Japanese eats Fig Newtons,” for example), if you don’t want to remind your correspondent of things that tend to be forbidden in prisons. Just don’t get confused, and keep them all straight:
Lucky Strike = Oreos
Parliaments = Fig Newtons
Kools = Chocolate chip cookies
etc.
But it’s a good, challenging logic puzzle, and it can be solved. Like I said, I did it.
Follow-up question (which has nothing to do with the puzzles themselves): I’ve thought of making the challenge even more interesting by offering monetary prizes or some other reward (like commissary snacks or items, which can be bought for inmates online via a prison website system) - something like, *“I will send you a super-tough riddle or puzzles on a regular basis, and if you can solve them, you get a $5 or $10 prize” *- (money can be put into an inmate’s commissary account online via prison website, too) - is this a good way to add intrigue to the challenge, or is it something that will backfire horribly in some unforeseen way, maybe even be illegal?
As a lawyer who has been to the local jail and who has heard from inmates before as to how important their commissary (in the local jail, it is just known as “canteen”) accounts are to them, I’d say that’s not a bad idea. Certainly, locally, anybody can top up a particular inmate’s account if they wish, and many times, the inmate’s family and/or friends will do so, if able.
However, you want to check with prison authorities first. It’s one thing for an inmate’s mother to put $10 in her son’s canteen account; it seems to me that it is another thing for an inmate to win a prize of some sort from a third party on the outside, even if the prize is only $10 on the inmate’s canteen account.
Speaking non-professionally, I like the idea. Speaking as a professional, I’d say that this is something you need to ask the authorities about. They’re the people who can tell you whether this might backfire, or be illegal.
The prize is an interesting idea, but I’d worry that psychologically it could turn the puzzle from pleasure into work. External rewards can make activities less intrinsically rewarding.
Not saying don’t do it, but think about the effects before you do.