Improving your process of logical thought.

Improving your process of logical thought.

By ghost | 6185 Reads |

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After looking at the articles on the logical challenges, I realized that what people really need isn't hints for each challenge, they need to learn how to think in a logical manner. I hope to set forth some techniques for analyzing questions such as the ones in the logical challenges area of hellboundhackers.

First, read the question carefully and thoroughly. Riddles are meant to be tricky, so I cannot stress this first point more clearly. But not only do you have to read it, you have to understand it. If it helps (which it almost always does) make point form notes of all the facts given to you.

Next, we must see what conclusions, if any, we can draw from these point form notes. As an example I will use the very first logical challenge.

you know that there are 10 beads/bag, you know that the beads in a bag weigh either 10 grams or 9 grams. You know that all the beads that weigh nine grams are in one bag, and the rest of the bags contain only beads that weigh 10 grams.

The paragraph above ^ would be your point form notes. you could then easily come to the conclusion that 4 bags will weigh 100 grams and the other will only weigh 90 grams. you can also conclude that there is a 10 gram difference between the first four and the last.

Now not all (if any) of this information will be useful, but more often than not you will find something that is.

Next, we move on to "what if" situations. If practical, try to think of every case-senario. With "the stairs of death" riddle, for example, try to think of as many combinations of hat colour possible.

Along the lines of the "what if" thinking, try to think outside of the box (as cliche as it sounds, you have to do it). A good way of doing this is going along every step of your failed solutions and saying to yourself "does that HAVE to happen in order to meet the requirements of the question. In the hat question, do they HAVE to line up and face one direction? yes, they do. Keep asking yourself these questions, and you'd be suprised what you can really do. The questions tend to be way too short to severly limit a creative thinker.

If there is a person involved, or several people, try to put yourself in their shoes. Think of all of their means of sensing things around them they have, and maybe you will realize they have more communication than you think. If nobody can speak, maybe they can feel? Can they see? what CANT they see? sometimes the negative side is just as important.

I think that just about sums up my method for tackling these questions. The only other thing I can think of pointing out is that if you are given an object or a tool to use, it was either given to you to use, or for the sole purpose of throwing you off. Most of the time when you find the answer to the question, you realized every point given to you in the question was crucial to solving the puzzle.

Oh, and lastly, if all else fails, try and do the question in reverse. Start at the solution and go backwards. This dosnt work for too many riddles, but even so, it often inspires some "outside the box" thinking.

Well, that just about wraps it up. This is my first article here, and I hope you all enjoyed it :) Leave some comments, i'd appreciate the feedback, positive or negative.