Talk:Puzzles

I think that the section "statistical puzzles" should rather read "probability puzzles" since this describes the nature of the contributed riddles more precisely (and there are really few statistical puzzles out there going beyond probability theory). However, it seems a bit tedious to make the change because of the references already in place -sboehringer

It's really nice to see so much interest! I'll try to put up some more cool puzzles (and of course I'd love to have some more puzzles put up by other people so that I can also try to solve a few :) Thomas

Suggestion: I think once we have more than 20 or so problems we should split them up into subcategories. Thomas

Suggestion: I think it will be easier to create for each puzzle an own solution page and put a link at the bottom of each puzzle. doopdoop


 * I agree, maybe we should have (at least) two levels of hierarchy in our book: 1. subcategories which contain a list of puzzles for each type 2. a page for each puzzle + an 'official solution' page for this puzzle (the talk page of a puzzle could be used to discuss clarifications, alternate solutions, ...) Thomas
 * Suggested structure (partially inspired by the rec.puzzles archive -> now implemented)


 * What about the classical n-queens or traveling salesman problems?

--Eibwen 07:10, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Overview

 * Two 4's equals 64?: solved
 * Knights, Knaves & Spies: solved
 * Knights, Knaves & Spies II: solved
 * Lying about your Age: solved
 * 12 coins: solved
 * Sharing Milk: solved
 * The Burning Island: solved
 * Crossing the River: solved
 * Crossing the River II: solved
 * Connecting Stars: solved
 * Getting out of Prison: solved
 * Three Daughters: solved
 * Weighings once more: solved
 * Rubber band: solved
 * Digits of the Square: solved
 * Hats: solved
 * Three Knights: solved
 * Pizzas: solved
 * Luxury Cars: solved
 * Connecting Utilities: solved
 * Yet another Weighing: solved
 * Escaping from Prison: solved
 * Scales and Weights: solved, open for better solutions
 * Two Boys and a River: open
 * The Pentagon: open
 * Boy, Girl, and a Dog: open
 * Barrel of Ale: open

Note: even if a problem is solved, you should try and solve it without looking at the solution on the talk page. That way we increase the chance of getting alternative solutions!

I've implemented the structure suggested by doopdoop. Every problem now has it's own problem page and solution page. Also, I think we can use a problem's talk page to vote on the difficulty (say from 1-10, where 1=very easy to 10=(almost) impossible). Thomas

Self-created puzzles
I presume that we're allowed to put puzzles that we created ourselves onto the page, right? Or not? Eric119 21:49, 11 Oct 2003 (UTC)


 * Absolutely! I think that's at least as interesting as gathering the 'standard' puzzles that are out there. Thomas


 * Only as interesting? Surely it's more interesting.  If we were only going to copy other sites/books, what would be the point? -- Smjg 15:13, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

Naming Conventions
I would like to suggest that we start adding a "- Puzzle" to the title of Puzzle pages. This would avoid naimng conflicts with other Wikibooks and furthermore make it more easy to detect new and open puzzles in the Recent changes. Thomas
 * Hi, I am new here (in fact I just created my account), but I'd suggest to put "Puzzle:" to the front, like in the pages of Cookbook. It should help to keep books together, and I wonder why this is not a standardized policy on Wikibooks yet... --Andreas Ipp 14:59, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * A little late for that? --Divinity 17:27, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * Not at all. Better late than never.  I hereby propose a hierarchy, so that the names'll look like this:
 * Puzzles - contents page
 * Puzzles:Logic puzzles - section page
 * Puzzles:Logic puzzles:Knights, Knaves & Spies - puzzle page
 * Puzzles:Logic puzzles:Knights, Knaves & Spies:Solution - solution page
 * And get the navigation header on every page while we're at it. Moreover, there are even some pages that have pathologically meaningless titles - just look at Puzzles:Lateral puzzles for instance.  Let's get cleaning at once!  (I've already done puzzles 5 and 7 there, so you can see what I mean.  But still, shouldn't they all have more descriptive titles?) -- Smjg 15:26, 13 July 2005 (UTC)
 * So to implement these ideas, you move the pages and redo all the links? Borbrav 18:01, July 14, 2005 (UTC)


 * Yes. I've started on it.  We can all work on it.  And while we're at it, we should make sure all pages have the navigation header, and that the navigation header has a line below it. -- Smjg 10:32, 22 September 2005 (UTC)

Some pages are acquiring poorly laid out navigation headers, like this


 * Puzzles | Puzzles:Logic puzzles | Puzzles:Logic puzzles:Knights, Knaves & Spies | Solution

That's something else to fix in the process. It should look like this:


 * Puzzles | Logic puzzles | Knights, Knaves & Spies | Solution

-- Smjg 18:02, 22 September 2005 (UTC)

I've just created some navigation header templates, which we could use to make life easier. So now we can do


 * etc. up to hc-navhead6.
 * etc. up to hc-navhead6.
 * etc. up to hc-navhead6.

A little less cumbersome than doing it manually, don't you think?

I've used it on Puzzles/Logic puzzles/Gold Coins. But I suppose we don't need to go through the ones we've already fixed changing them to use this template quite yet. Note that they automatically include the horizontal line - hopefully this'll see the end of people omitting it. -- Smjg 18:06, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Bot spec
I've written the following specification, which should enable User:Tsca.bot to get to work. I suggest that this stays here for a few days, giving people time to suggest changes to the spec, before the bot starts work. -- Smjg 17:52, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Pass 1: Fix the page titles
Starting from the main Puzzles page, follow the links. Move each page to its correct title if it isn't already, using the displayed text of the link by which the page was reached.

For example, the page linked as Two-player games from the main Puzzles page shall become Puzzles:Two-player games. The page linked as Picking Game under that page shall become Puzzles:Two-player games:Picking Game.

Special cases to observe:


 * 1) Ignore navigation header links (see below) during this stage of the process.
 * 2) If a colon appears in the text of a link, ignore all text preceding the colon when generating the new page name.
 * 3) If the link text begins with a lowercase letter, change the first letter to uppercase when generating the title.  For example, Puzzles:Arithmetical puzzles:Three Daughters:Solution not Puzzles:Arithmetical puzzles:Three Daughters:solution.
 * 4) If the text of a link contains the word solution, then use Solution by itself as the name at that level rather than the whole text of the link.
 * 5) If two or more pages link to the same page (either directly or via redirects), then go by the link on the first page that was encountered.  For example, some puzzles have hint pages as well as the solution page, and have both hint and solution links from the main puzzle page.  The hint page may also have a solution link.  Invariably, you will reach the main puzzle page before the hint page.  Consequently, the solution page will be a child page of the main puzzle page, not of the hint page.
 * 6) Two pages, namely Number sequences and Riddles, display several puzzles at once, each with its own solution page.  I'm not sure how the solution pages should be named at the moment.  Meanwhile, I suggest that we skip processing these pages, and then maybe we can deal with them later.

Pass 2: Tidying up the pages
Once the pages are at their correct titles, the bot can then work at tidying up the pages themselves. On the main Puzzles page, I believe the only thing that needs doing is to update the links. On the pages within the book, there is the following work to do:


 * 1) Make sure every page has a navigation header.  Use the hc-navhead2, hc-navhead3, etc. templates, replacing any manually typed header that may be present on the page.  It is sufficient to check whether the page begins with a link back to Puzzles, and if so, delete the whole line.  Any horizontal line immediately below the nav header should also be removed, since the hc-navhead templates automatically include one.
 * 2) Apart from that which is in the navigation header, there should be no repetition of the puzzle title at the beginning of the page content as is present on some of the How do you ... ? pages.
 * 3) Adjust all links to point to the pages by their new, hierarchical names, and make the display text exactly match the final part of the title.
 * 4) Link text should be non-bold.

Changes
If you wish to propose or discuss any changes or additions, please do so here.

Recent attempts
Withinfocus, who added cleanup-NC, obviously didn't practise what the notice preaches by looking at this talk page. As it happens, at least two users - Think Fast and SBJohnny - have undertaken to implement the slashes convention, while at the same time failing to agree on other common-sense conventions ("Logic puzzles" vs. "Analytical Puzzles"). There are also plenty of other cleanups that could be done to the page titles as well as making them use slashes. -- Smjg 12:20, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Hah, I just saw this little dig even though I added that template many months ago. The addition of the template was perfectly valid. Should the naming convention need to be discussed it would be done here as it was in some form above. Flagging a poorly-organized book was my goal and that's what happened, therefore there was nothing I "didn't practice" and my actions are correct. My addition of the template does not require discussion, only the implementation of the naming change does. I'm writing this so that if others notice it they won't be afraid to mark books that need cleanup. This is an implementation of policy and all books should be well-formed here at Wikibooks. The naming suggestions above need improvement in many ways so that colon convention can be avoided, but that will be tackled when a user who knows categories and the slash convention well feels like taking the effort to reorganize here. I unfortunately do not have the time currently. -within focus 17:00, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Just to clarify, the system that has been mostly followed is that section titles ("Logic puzzles", etc.) are in sentence case, but individual puzzle titles are in title case. This makes a little sense, ISFA one might think of puzzle titles as like titles of a book, song, film, etc. whereas section titles are just descriptive phrases used to group the puzzles. But is it ideal?

It gets even more tricky when you consider that puzzles within Puzzles:Chess problems, and possibly a few others, have more or less descriptive titles rather than titles in the style of the others, and generally have puzzle titles in sentence case.

What are we going to do then? Before we do any more page moving, we should all agree on a convention for capitalising titles. We should also decide what to do with Puzzles:Number sequences, which currently has the puzzles all on one page and each solution on a page of its own. -- Smjg 18:06, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Non-scientific puzzles
There are some logical puzzles that are too simple to be called logical, or non-solveable, or too contradictory, but interesting nonetheless. I added a new section, Non-Scientific Puzzles. --Divinity 18:24, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

New Link Under Puzzle Resources
I added this link to a lot of riddles however the answeres aren't necessarily given to you so for a lot of them you might need to figure them out or check the Wu Forum however these are a lot of great riddles.* Riddles–Wu:Riddles I also added this link which has a wide variety of puzzles *Jim Loy's Puzzle Pages--71.234.101.173 19:39, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Some pages don't seem to belong
Is this supposed to be a book of puzzles, a book about puzzles or a book of links to puzzles? I'd think the former. In this case, some of the pages seem out of place:


 * Puzzles/Bongard problems and Puzzles/Sudoku are web links to puzzles. The former has a bit of information on what Bongard problems are, but that's an aside.  Of course, if somebody wants to create some puzzles of these kinds to publish in this book, that's fine.


 * Puzzles:Rubik's cubes and the other bullet points under Puzzles don't seem to make sense to have here. Of course a web page can present an applet for the user to play Rubik's cube or any mechanical puzzle, but Wikibooks isn't really the place for this.  You could argue that the right thing to have here is puzzles on how to construct specific Rubik's Cube patterns or perform specific manoeuvres, but that's still probably not the right title for such a section.

-- Smjg 18:16, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree, they do not belong here.

I will try to reorder or remove them.

Zezen (discuss • contribs) 08:26, 4 July 2020 (UTC)

Wikiversity Contributor Needs Material on "Puzzles"!
I intend to read ALL of the previous discussion before I start serious editing. I agree that there is a need to overhaul the available material, so I intend to join in the discussion here.  New Wikibooks User: Ray Calvin Baker (discuss • contribs) 23:07, 31 October 2012 (UTC)