Talks Scott Kim takes apart the art of puzzles

46,034 views ・ 2009-12-04

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:15
For the last 20 years I've been designing puzzles.
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And I'm here today to give you
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a little tour, starting from the very first puzzle I designed,
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through what I'm doing now.
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I've designed puzzles for books, printed things.
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I'm the puzzle columnist for Discover Magazine.
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I've been doing that for about 10 years.
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I have a monthly puzzle calendar.
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I do toys. The bulk of my work is in computer games.
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I did puzzles for "Bejeweled."
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(Applause)
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I didn't invent "Bejeweled." I can't take credit for that.
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So, very first puzzle,
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sixth grade, my teacher said,
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"Oh, let's see, that guy, he likes to make stuff.
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I'll have him cut out letters out of construction paper
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for the board."
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I thought this was a great assignment.
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And so here is what I came up with. I start fiddling with it.
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I came up with this letter. This is a letter of the alphabet
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that's been folded just once.
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The question is, which letter is it if I unfold it?
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One hint: It's not "L."
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(Laughter)
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It could be an "L," of course.
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So, what else could it be?
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Yeah, a lot of you got it.
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Oh yeah. So, clever thing.
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Now, that was my first puzzle. I got hooked.
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I created something new, I was very excited
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because, you know, I'd made crossword puzzles,
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but that's sort of like filling in somebody else's matrix.
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This was something really original. I got hooked.
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I read Martin Gardner's columns in Scientific American.
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Went on, and eventually decided to devote myself, full time, to that.
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Now, I should pause and say, what do I mean by puzzle?
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A puzzle is a problem that is fun to solve
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and has a right answer.
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"Fun to solve," as opposed to everyday problems,
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which, frankly, are not very well-designed puzzles.
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You know, they might have a solution.
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It might take a long time. Nobody wrote down the rules clearly.
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Who designed this?
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It's like, you know, life is not a very well-written story
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so we have to hire writers to make movies.
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Well, I take everyday problems, and I make puzzles out of them.
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And "right answer," of course there might be more than one right answer;
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many puzzles have more than one.
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But as opposed to a couple other forms of play,
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toys and games --
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by toy I mean, something you play with that doesn't have a particular goal.
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You can create one out of Legos.
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You know, you can do anything you want.
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Or competitive games like chess where,
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well, you're not trying to solve ... You can make a chess puzzle,
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but the goal really is to beat another player.
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I consider that puzzles are an art form.
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They're very ancient. It goes back as long as there is written history.
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It's a very small form, like a joke,
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a poem, a magic trick or a song, very compact form.
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At worst, they're throwaways, they're for amusement.
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But at best they can reach for something more
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and create a memorable impression.
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The progression of my career that you'll see
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is looking for creating puzzles that have a memorable impact.
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So, one thing I found early on, when I started doing computer games,
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is that I could create puzzles that will alter your perception.
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I'll show you how. Here is a famous one.
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So, it's two profiles in black, or a white vase in the middle.
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This is called a figure-ground illusion.
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The artist M.C. Escher exploited that
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in some of his wonderful prints.
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Here we have "Day and Night."
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Here is what I did with figure and ground.
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So, here we have "figure" in black.
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Here we have "figure" in white.
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And it's all part of the same design.
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The background to one is the other.
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Originally I tried to do the words "figure" and "ground."
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But I couldn't do that, I realized. I changed the problem.
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It's all "figure."
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(Laughter)
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A few other things. Here is my name.
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And that turns into the title of my first book, "Inversions."
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These sorts of designs now go by the word "ambigram."
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I'll show you just a couple others. Here we have
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the numbers one through 10, the digits zero through nine, actually.
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Each letter here is one of these digits.
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Not strictly an ambigram in the conventional sense.
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I like pushing on what an ambigram can mean.
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Here's the word "mirror." No, it's not the same upside-down.
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It's the same this way.
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And a marvelous fellow from the Media Lab
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who just got appointed head of RISD, is John Maeda.
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And so I did this for him. It's sort of a visual canon.
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(Laughter)
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And recently in Magic magazine
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I've done a number of ambigrams on magician's names.
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So here we have Penn and Teller, same upside-down.
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This appears in my puzzle calendar.
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Okay, let's go back to the slides.
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Thank you very much.
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Now, those are fun to look at.
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Now how would you do it interactively?
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For a while I was an interface designer.
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And so I think a lot about interaction.
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Well, let's first of all simplify the vases illusion,
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make the thing on the right.
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Now, if you could pick up the black vase,
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it would look like the figure on top.
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If you could pick up the white area,
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it would look like the figure on the bottom.
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Well, you can't do that physically,
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but on a computer you can do it. Let's switch over to the P.C.
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And here it is, figure-ground.
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The goal here is to take the pieces on the left
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and make them so they look like the shape on the right.
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And this follows the rules I just said:
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any black area that is surrounded by white can be picked up.
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But that is also true of any white area.
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So, here we got the white area in the middle,
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and you can pick it up.
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I'll just go one step further.
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So, here is --
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here is a couple pieces. Move them together,
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and now this is an active piece.
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You can really get inside somebody's perception
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and have them experience something.
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It's like the old maxim of
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"you can tell somebody something
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and show them, but if they do it they really learn it."
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Here is another thing you can do.
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There is a game called Rush Hour.
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This is one of the true masterpieces in puzzle design
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besides Rubik's cube.
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So, here we have a crowded parking lot
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with cars all over the place.
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The goal is to get the red car out. It's a sliding block puzzle.
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It's made by the company Think Fun.
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It's done very well. I love this puzzle.
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Well, let's play one. Here. So, here is a very simple puzzle.
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Well, that's too simple, let's add another piece.
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Okay, so how would you solve this one?
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Well, move the blue one out of the way.
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Here, let's make it a little harder. Still pretty easy.
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Now we'll make it harder, a little harder.
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Now, this one is a little bit trickier.
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You know? What do you do here?
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The first move is going to be what?
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You're going to move the blue one up in order to get the lavender one to the right.
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And you can make puzzles like this one that aren't solvable at all.
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Those four are locked in a pinwheel; you can't get them apart.
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I wanted to make a sequel.
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I didn't come up with the original idea. But this is another way
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I work as an inventor is to create a sequel.
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I came up with this. This is Railroad Rush Hour.
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It's the same basic game except I introduced a new piece,
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a square piece that can move both horizontally and vertically.
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In the other game the cars can only move forward and back.
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Created a whole bunch of levels for it.
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Now I'm making it available to schools.
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And it includes exercises that show you
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not just how to solve these puzzles,
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but how to extract the principles that will let you solve
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mathematical puzzles or problems in science, other areas.
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So, I'm really interested in you learning how to make your own puzzles
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as well as just me creating them.
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Garry Trudeau calls himself an investigative cartoonist.
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You know, he does a lot of research before he writes a cartoon.
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In Discover Magazine, I'm an investigative puzzle maker.
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I got interested in gene sequencing.
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And I said, "Well, how on Earth can you come up with a sequence
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of the base pairs in DNA?"
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Cut up the DNA, you sequence individual pieces,
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and then you look for overlaps,
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and you basically match them at the edges. And I said,
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"This is kind of like a jigsaw puzzle, except the pieces overlap."
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So, here is what I created for Discover Magazine.
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And it has to be solvable in a magazine.
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You know, you can't cut out the pieces and move them around.
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So, here is the nine pieces. And you're supposed to put them into this grid.
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And you have to choose pieces that overlap on the edge.
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There is only one solution. It's not that hard.
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But it takes some persistence.
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And when you're done, it makes this design,
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which, if you squint, is the word "helix."
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So, that's the form of the puzzle coming out of the content,
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rather than the other way around.
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Here is a couple more. Here is a physics-based puzzle.
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Which way will these fall?
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One of these weighs 50 pounds, 30 pounds and 10 pounds.
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And depending on which one weighs which amount,
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they'll fall different directions.
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And here is a puzzle based on color mixing.
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I separated this image into cyan, magenta, yellow, black,
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the basic printing colors, and then mixed up the separations,
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and you get these peculiar pictures.
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Which separations were mixed up to make those pictures?
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Gets you thinking about color.
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Finally, what I'm doing now. So, ShuffleBrain.com,
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website you can go visit, I joined up with my wife, Amy-Jo Kim.
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She could easily be up here giving a talk about her work.
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So, we're making smart games for social media.
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I'll explain what that means. We're looking at three trends.
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This is what's going on in the games industry right now.
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First of all, you know, for a long time
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computer games meant things like "Doom,"
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where you're going around shooting things, very violent games, very fast,
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aimed at teenage boys. Right? That's who plays computer games.
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Well, guess what? That's changing.
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"Bejeweled" is a big hit. It was the game that really broke open
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what's called casual games.
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And the main players are over 35, and are female.
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Then recently "Rock Band" has been a big hit.
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And it's a game you play with other people.
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It's very physical. It looks nothing like a traditional game.
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This is what's becoming the dominant form of electronic gaming.
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Now, within that there is some interesting things happening.
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There is also a trend towards games that are good for you.
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Why? Well, we aging Boomers,
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Baby Boomers, we're eating our healthy food,
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we're exercising. What about our minds?
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Oh no, our parents are getting Alzheimer's. We better do something.
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Turns out doing crossword puzzles can stave off some of the effects of Alzheimer's.
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So, we got games like "Brain Age" coming out for the Nintendo DS, huge hit.
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A lot of people do Sudoku. In fact some doctors prescribe it.
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And then there is social media, and what's happening on the Internet.
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Everybody now considers themselves a creator,
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and not just a viewer.
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And what does this add up to?
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Here is what we see coming.
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It's games that fit into a healthy lifestyle.
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They're part of your life. They're not necessarily a separate thing.
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And they are both, something that is good for you, and they're fun.
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I'm a puzzle guy. My wife is an expert in social media.
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And we decided to combine our skills.
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Our first game is called "Photo Grab." The game takes about a minute and 20 seconds.
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This is your first time playing my game. Okay.
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Let's see how well we can do. There are three images.
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And we have 24 seconds each.
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Where is that?
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I'll play as fast as I can.
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But if you can see it, shout out the answer.
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You get more -- Down, okay, yeah where is that?
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Oh, yeah. There, okay. J-O and --
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I guess that's that part. We got the bow. That bow helps.
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That's his hair. You get a lot of figure-ground problems.
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Yeah, that one is easy. Okay. So, ahhh! Okay on to the next one.
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Okay, so that's the lens.
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Anybody?
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Looks like a black shape. So, where is that?
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That's the corner of the whole thing.
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Yeah, I've played this image before,
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but even when I make up my own puzzles --
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and you can put your own images in here.
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And we have people all over the world doing that now.
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There we are. Visit ShuffleBrain.com
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if you want to try it yourself. Thank you.
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11:40
(Applause)
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