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Puzzle & Thinking Games · 55

Good puzzle interfaces make illegal moves obvious, because the interesting challenge should be reasoning about the rules rather than guessing what the controls permit. A related fact is worth keeping: Ernő Rubik designed his famous cube in the 1970s as a way to explore three-dimensional movement before it became a worldwide puzzle phenomenon. A puzzle is a machine for making the obvious wait until you have tried everything else.

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Worth knowing

A Möbius strip has only one side and one edge. Make one from paper with a half-twist, draw a line without lifting the pencil, and eventually you return to the starting point after covering what looked like both sides. One more strange-but-useful detail: The '15 puzzle' caused a craze in the late nineteenth century. Some scrambled positions are mathematically impossible to solve, which is a wonderfully cruel property for a puzzle sold to the public.