The progression of logic puzzles as entertainment

Logic puzzles have been a source of joy for me since I was a young child. Not riddles, where there's a piece of information you have to infer or a trick you need to grasp. Logic puzzles. Those classic grids and tables with x number of houses and x number of pets and x numbers of colors that all match up 1 to 1 to 1. The kind where you have all of the information you need, you just have to work through it to make it line up correctly. When I was in elementary school, our teachers would sometimes give them to us and I always asked for more of them.

That joy carried through school and into my career and life since. In fact, the love of logic puzzles has shaped how I approach problems I'm facing in day-to-day life. Be it figuring out a home improvement process, or working with a group to come to a resolution at work, I approach it the same way: with the belief that all of the information exists such that a solution can be worked out correctly for all involved. It's just a matter of figuring out the pieces, the overlaps, and the differences so that things line up correctly.

The spark for this particular reflection was the dinner party we hosted last night. Of the six of us, there was one vegetarian, one vegan, one omnivore with many food sensitivities, and some general food dislikes from one person or another.  As I worked on the menu the night before, I found myself approaching it much like I did those logic puzzles in elementary school. Where are the intersections? Where are the places where things are different? And what are the tastiest options on the list that provides several choices for each person? The difference in this scenario was the goal of having the maximum number of common solutions, rather than a one-to-one match for each person. Still, the approach worked, and once I had narrowed down the main ingredients, finding recipes to support those ingredients was just a simple search for things that sounded good. A few substitutions, and voila! A lovely dinner for a wonderful group of people!

Over dinner we spoke about the imaginary Venn diagram that resulted from the various diets. While it's not in the form of a logic puzzle solution, the actual Venn diagram was still fun to put together.