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    Lateral Logic: Puzzle Your Way to Smart Thinking
    Lateral Logic: Puzzle Your Way to Smart Thinking
    Lateral Logic: Puzzle Your Way to Smart Thinking
    Ebook175 pages1 hour

    Lateral Logic: Puzzle Your Way to Smart Thinking

    By Gareth Moore

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    Learn to open your mind and unlock your natural abilities to solve all kinds of real-life conundrums with this programme designed to improve your lateral thinking, from bestselling brain-training and puzzle book author Gareth Moore.

    Sideways thinking; moving away from traditional modes of thought; discarding the obvious: lateral thinking is an effective, alternative approach to problem-solving.

    Showing you how to tackle problems creatively and solve brain-teasers by thinking outside the box, Lateral Logic will help you develop useful problem-solving skills for all areas of your everyday life.

    This is not a regular puzzle book, but a specially developed programme to help you improve your mental agility as you enjoy the challenging puzzles.

    With puzzles including creative visualization and logic teasers, this helpful book will help you to open your mind and become more productive.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMichael O'Mara
    Release dateApr 28, 2016
    ISBN9781782436898
    Lateral Logic: Puzzle Your Way to Smart Thinking
    Author

    Gareth Moore

    Dr Gareth Moore is the author of a wide range of brain-training and puzzle books for both children and adults, including the bestselling The Penguin Book of Puzzles and The Ordnance Survey Puzzle Book, The Mammoth Book of Brain Games, The Brain Workout, The Mammoth Book of New Sudoku and The Rough Guide Book of Brain Training. He is also the creator of online brain training site www.BrainedUp.com and runs the daily puzzle website www.PuzzleMix.com. He gained his Ph.D from Cambridge University in the field of Machine Learning, and has contributed to various advanced projects for leading technology companies.

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    • 4/5
      Good read, Problems are Useful as well. Really enjoyed it.

    Book preview

    Lateral Logic - Gareth Moore

    Dr Gareth Moore is the creator of daily brain-training site BrainedUp.com, and author of a wide range of brain-training and puzzle books for both children and adults, including both Anti-Stress Puzzles and The Brain Workout.

    He gained his Ph.D at the University of Cambridge, where he worked on machine intelligence.

    First published in Great Britain in 2016 by

    Michael O’Mara Books Limited

    9 Lion Yard

    Tremadoc Road

    London SW4 7NQ

    Copyright © Michael O’Mara Books Limited 2016

    Puzzles and solutions copyright © Gareth Moore 2016

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

    A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

    ISBN: 978-1-78243-579-2 in paperback format

    ISBN: 978-1-78243-689-8 in ebook format

    www.mombooks.com

    www.drgarethmoore.com

    Typeset and designed by Gareth Moore

    Contents

    Introduction

    Beginner

    Experienced

    Expert

    Introduction

    Welcome to Lateral Logic! By the time you’ve worked your way to the end, you’ll have proven yourself a master of both creative thinking and abstract thought!

    Puzzle contents

    The tasks in this book are broken into three difficulties: beginner, experienced and expert. Even if you’re familiar with lateral-thinking puzzles, it’s best to start at the beginning and work your way through because many of the questions build on one another as the book progresses. If you jump straight to the end then you’ll risk spoiling the solution to a few of the earlier tasks.

    Puzzles on the same page are usually related, either in terms of topic or by forming a series of progressive challenges. As with the book in general, it’s best to start with the first puzzle on a page before trying the second, so as not to spoil the answer to the preceding puzzle.

    Some of the tasks in this book are designed to help you build your lateral-thinking skills by providing carefully constrained creative challenges. These will aid in unlocking creative abilities innate to all of us that you might not have realized you have!

    Hints and solutions

    You’ll find both a ‘Hints’ section and a ‘Solutions’ section following each puzzle. You shouldn’t be shy about reading the ‘Hints’ if you get stuck on a puzzle, but start with the first hint, if there is more than one, and then return to the puzzle for a bit before you read the second or subsequent hints. The hints are arranged in order of revelation, from least to most, so the more hints you read then the easier the puzzle will become.

    Full solutions are given for every puzzle, but if you aren’t sure if you have the expected solution then it’s a good idea to read the hints first, even if you don’t think you need them, to see if your solution seems to match up. In this way you won’t be spoiled for the given solution if you’ve managed to come up with another answer.

    For some lateral-thinking puzzles there may be other reasonable solutions, but it’s worth remembering that what you’re really looking for in most cases is the simplest, most sensible solution to a puzzle. It’s often possible to come up with bizarre and unlikely solutions, so the skill is in finding a clean and realistic answer in each case. It’s up to your own judgement as to whether any alternative answer you might find lives up to those criteria.

    There are also some puzzles in this book which have specific, unique answers. It will always be clear from the text when you reach this type of task, so in these cases the answer given is the only correct solution.

    How to solve lateral-thinking puzzles

    Lateral-thinking puzzles typically require you to think about options which are not specifically given in the question. A classic example involves a hypothetical situation where there are three light bulbs in one room and three switches in another. You are told that each light switch operates a different one of the three bulbs, but what you don’t know is which switch is which. All of the bulbs are switched off, and you can’t see the room with the bulbs from the room where the switches are. The problem is to work out which switch controls which bulb, without entering either room more than once. You are on your own in the rooms, so you can’t just call out to someone else to see which bulb is affected by which switch.

    If you were able to go in and out of each room twice, the problem would be simple. You would enter the room with the switches, turn on one switch, go to the room with the bulbs and make a note of which bulb had illuminated. You’d then return to the switch room and turn on a second switch, before returning again to the room with the lights and seeing which bulb had come on the second time. Clearly, the third switch would then control the third bulb, and the problem would be solved.

    You only have a single visit to the switch room, so you must do something else to allow you to identify which bulb each of the three switches controls. To solve the puzzle, it’s best to start by thinking through all of the possibilities, which seem to be:

    1) Turn on no switches

    2) Turn on one switch

    3) Turn on two switches

    4) Turn on all three switches

    Option 1 won’t help, since you will clearly learn nothing. Option 2 will identify one switch-bulb pair, but leave you with a 50:50 guess for the other two. Similarly, option 3 will identify the off bulb as corresponding to one of the switches, but again leave you with a 50:50 guess for the remaining two switches. Option 4 is no better than option 1.

    In an ordinary type of puzzle, one of the four options above would be the answer, because in a non-lateral-thinking puzzle you tend to have all the possible parameters explicitly given to you in the question. In this case, however, you need to think of options which are not explicitly given to you. Once you do this, of course, there are often many different potential solutions, as discussed above, but what you’re always looking for is the easiest and most reasonable solution.

    In this particular puzzle, if the question hadn’t mentioned that you were on your

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