Review: A challenging collection of brainteasers
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 07 14, 2014
I think I've always enjoyed solving brainteasers and logic puzzles, and now as I approach seventy years old, I think (and hope) that keeping an active mind will help to ward off senility. In any case, though, the brainteasers in Zack Guido's book are fun and challenging. I got the answers to some of them, but with many of the brainteasers, I had to look up the answers. But even having to read the answers was interesting, although I had a number of "Why didn't I think of that?" moments. The format of the book is ideal for this kind of material. After each brainteaser is a link to the answer, and after the answer is a link to return to the brainteaser. It makes looking up the answers when you're stumped very easy, and you can't accidentally see the answers to other brainteasers.One of the 78 brainteasers, such as #3 "Fox Trotting," involved semantics ("How far can a fox run into the woods?"), but most required pure logic to figure out. In some of the brainteasers, like #6 "Circular Divisions," having a pencil and paper handy will help. The brainteasers don't require higher mathematics to solve, but I've seen one that used basic probability to find the answer.You could probably find most of the brainteasers in the collection online, but having them all together in one book in a format where you don't have to worry about unintentionally seeing the answer is ideal for serious puzzle solvers.