Crack logically: Best books on puzzles to improve your logical capabilities
There’s no book which will help you instantly catapult your abilities above basic. Practice is the key to crack logically and the right book gives you the wit and wisdom to crack some the crucial puzzles skillfully.
Reading and writing are two powerful ways to enhance your logical and reasoning abilities. Your reasoning skills help you comprehend the puzzles, solve life problems, efficient decision making, and communicating effectively. Puzzles push your critical thinking, identifying biases, assumptions, and fallacies, analyzing arguments, and drawing judgements ability from normal to highly efficient. To know the right approach to solve logical puzzles first lets learn about logical puzzles.
What are logical Puzzles?
Logical Reasoning Puzzles require you to analyze the given piece of information, pick the information that is important and cut off the information which you do not require in solving the given set of questions. Reasoning puzzles are mostly based on blood relations, arrangements, inequalities, etc. Sometimes, the questions test your lateral thinking and may not require any deduction or analysis.
Basic steps to solve logical Puzzles
- Take a quick look at the question.
- Develop a general idea regarding the theme of the problem.
- Select the data that is giving you some concrete information out of total information given. Also, select the data which helps in running out certain possibilities.
Useful secondary information:
Generally, the first few sentences of the given data give you the basic information that is required to know the general idea of the problem. This is called the ‘useful secondary information’.
Actual information:
Data left after putting aside the useful secondary information is called actual information. While trying to solve the problem, you should begin with the actual information while the useful secondary information should be kept in mind.
Negative information:
Some parts of the actual information may consist of negative information. Negative information does not inform us anything exactly but it gives us a chance to eliminate a possibility. Sentence like “P is not the mother Q” or “B is not a hill-station” are called negative information.
Basic steps to follow while solving logical puzzles
- Firstly, collect all the direct information.
- Arrange the direct information in a tabular format.
- Then identify all the negative information and mark it in your table according to the given data.
- Other facts can be found from the indirect information.
- The most important point is that in some condition/s, there will be more than one possibility.
- So, according to possibilities arrange them in different tables.
- Reject all the tables which violate other information given in puzzle.
- By following this process, you will reach at the correct answer.
- Most Puzzles are tricky. So, take care of every word and sentence.
By engaging with puzzles regularly, you hone your problem-solving skills and learn to approach challenges with a logical and analytical mindset. Critical and analytical thinking: Puzzles encourage you to analyze information, assess options, and make informed decisions based on evidence and logical thinking.
Here’s a list of a few books, reading them will surely direct you in the right path to approach and intervene a problem with varying difficulties.
Logical Thinking by Charles Philips
Author: Charles Philips
Publisher: Welbeck
Published: 08/07/2021
ISBN: 9781787397279
Format: Paperback
Pages: 96
These brain teasing puzzles have been designed to help the reader think in new ways, with scenarios and tips specifically aimed at professionals who want to improve their skills in the business world.
The Whodunnit Puzzle Book by Gareth Moore, Laura, Jayne Ayres
Author: Gareth Moore, Laura, Jayne Ayres
Publisher: Michael O’Mara Books, Limited, 2023
Published: 14/09/2023
ISBN: 1789295823, 9781789295825
Format: Paperback
Pages: 224
Featuring 10 scenarios, each scenario opens with a scene setting and notes made in the notebook of the investigator which lead you through a series of puzzles to the denouement. With all kinds of puzzles, from sudoku to hanjie and word searches to ciphers, this book will put your wits to the test – so get your Agatha Christie on, grab a cup of tea and a pencil and get ready to snuggle up with this perplexing collection of cozy time puzzles.
Around the world in 80 Games by Marcus du Sautoy
Author: Marcus du Sautoy
Publisher: HarperCollins UK, 2023
Published: 7/11/2023
ISBN: 0008525935, 9780008525934
Format: Paperback
Pages: 384
Renowned Mathematician Marcus du Sautoy investigates how games provided the first opportunities for deep mathematical insight into the world, how understanding math can help us play games better, and how both math and games are integral human psychology and culture. For as long as there have been people, there have been games, and for nearly as long, we have been exploring and discovering mathematics. A grand adventure, Around the world in 80 games are won, but how they, and their math, shape who we are.
The Book of Numbers by Shakuntala Devi
Author: Shakuntala Devi
Publisher: Orient Paperbacks, 2006
Published: 1/1/1984
ISBN: 8122200060, 9788122200065
Format: Paperback
Pages: 144
Shakuntala Devi, the internationally famous Mathematical wizard, makes it easy for us – and interesting. This book contains all we always wanted to know about numbers but was difficult to understand, and which was nowhere available. Divided into 3 sections, the first will tell you related everything about numbers, the second some anecdotes related with numbers and mathematicians, and the third a few important tables that will always help you. Shakuntala Devi popularly known as “The human computer” is a world famous mathematical prodigy who continues to out compute the most sophisticated computers. She took only 50 seconds to calculate the twenty-third root of 201 digit number. To verify her answer, a computer in Washington programmed with over 13,000 instructions took ten seconds longer. Shakuntala Devi firmly believes that Mathematic can be great fun for everybody.
The Game of Logic by Lewis Carroll
Author: Lewis Carroll
Publisher: Hard Press
Published: 3/11/2006
ISBN: 9781406927238 (ISBN10: 1406927236)
Format: Paperback
Pages: 100
This book written by the English mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), better known under his literary pseudonym Lewis Carroll. The Game of Logic describes, in an informal and playful style, the use of a board game to represent logical propositions and inferences. Carroll incorporated the game into a longer and more formal introductory logic textbook titled Symbolic Logic, published in 1897. The books are sometimes reprinted in a single volume.
To mock a mockingbird by Raymond Smullyan
Author: Raymond Smullyan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 30/11/2000
ISBN: 9780192801425
Format: Paperback
Pages: 246
In this entertaining and challenging collection of logic puzzles, Raymond Smullyan – author of Forever Undecided – continues to delight and astonish us with his gift for making available, in the thoroughly pleasurable form of puzzles, some of the most important mathematical thinking of our time. In the first part of the book, he transports us once again to that wonderful realm where knights, knaves, twin sisters, quadruplet brothers, gods, demons, and mortals either always tell the truth or always lie, and where truth-seekers are set a variety of fascinating problems. The section culminates in an enchanting and profound metapuzzle in which Inspector Craig of Scotland Yard gets involved in a search for the Fountain of Youth on the Island of Knights and Knaves.
In the second part of To Mock a Mockingbird, we accompany the Inspector on a summer-long adventure into the field of combinatory logic (a branch of logic that plays an important role in computer science and artificial intelligence). His adventure, which includes enchanted forests, talking birds, bird sociologists, and a classic quest, provides for us along the way the pleasure of solving puzzles of increasing complexity until we reach the Master Forest and – thanks to Godel’s famous theorem – the final revelation.
The Riddle of Scheherazade by Raymond Smullyan
Author: Raymond Smullyan
Publisher: Harvest
Published: 12/11/1998
ISBN: 9780156006064 (ISBN10: 0156006065)
Format: Paperback
Pages: 240
“The most entertaining logician and set theorist who ever lived” (Martin Gardner) gives us an encore to The Lady or the Tiger?-a fiendishly clever, utterly captivating new collection of 225 brainteasers, puzzles, and paradoxes.
Conclusion
Hence, Puzzles encourage critical thinking, analytical thinking, and the ability to evaluate situations and draw conclusions based on evidence.