Trivial Matters

After a long day of writing math, and then reading about math, and then writing some more math, I like to unwind with a good number logic puzzle. There’s a UK company, Conceptis (http://www.conceptispuzzles.com), that puts them online for free each week. I started going to their site years ago when I was doing them on paper in Games Magazine.

In that time they’ve more than doubled the number of different puzzles available, and I’m just now exploring the new ones. Specifically, Battleship and Hashi. Battleship is like the board game, except you use number clues to determine how many ship segments are in each row/collumn.

Hashi is a bit more difficult to describe. It is a sheet of arranged numbers, each number being an “island.” The number represents how many other “islands” it connects to by a “bridge.” As you build bridges, you start cutting the islands off from one another because you can’t cross two bridges. However, you can two bridges connect the same islands (though no more than two).

I’ve done all of the Battleships for this week. It took me a few days to work out the strategies for the harder puzzles, but now that I have them down the rest will be easy. Hashi strategy is another matter. It’s going to take me a bit longer to work those hard puzzles (though it still makes my Calculus homework look easy).

So if you’re bored, or just need a distraction. Head over to Conceptis and try some of them out. They also have sudoku and kakuro which you can play online or print out. In fact, most of the games can be played online, and all of them can be printed out for the train, bus, etc.