MOST OF THE CODES IN THE REST OF THIS ISSUE HAVE ONE IMPORTANT THING IN COMMON: Their main goal is that no one should be able to solve them, without having the key. Puzzles, the recreational version of codes, have the opposite goal: Their whole purpose is to be solved, with nothing more than the information that’s given.
A puzzle can be anything. There are physical puzzles like jigsaws. There are puzzles that involve grids of letters or numbers, like crosswords, word searches, and Sudoku. There are visual puzzles like spot-the-differences, logic puzzles like tales of liars and truth-tellers, encoded-message puzzles like cryptograms, and even puzzles thousands of years old like the riddle of the Sphinx. The thing they all have in common is an aha moment, when the solver suddenly sees how pieces fall into place, and the hidden order in apparent chaos is found.
PUZZLES WITHIN PUZZLES
More complex and rewarding than a single puzzle is a . A. That larger puzzle brings all the others together to lead to one final answer.
