Why Puzzle?
All parts of our body need exercise to stay fit, and so does the mind. While growing up, my father would ask my brother and I puzzles pretty much every day. It will be fair to say that my brother and I were addicted to puzzles and looked forward to these puzzles. During high school days as well as during my undergraduate and my Masters, I would go to great lengths to find new puzzles, create puzzle groups and mingle with people with similar “puzzling” interests. I, however, forgot about this passion in the last 20 years. I do not think I am alone who has the excuse of a busy career, travel, kids, parents, ….as to why I could not continue with this passion.
Last year, during a class organized by Intellitots, I met with Abhinav who would ask a new puzzle every single week during these Sunday classes. His passion for puzzles rekindled my interest yet again, and I realized to my surprise how much my daughter (elder one, who is now 8 years) loved these puzzles the same way.
This blog is an attempt to share this passion with other people. I hope that you will participate and enjoy. Please remember that this is not a competition, but a way to exercise a part of our brain that seldom gets utilized. This is meant for people across all age groups. To the extent possible, I will categorize the puzzles for different age groups, but my judgment can be wrong from time to time.
There are no rules for this except one – Please do not post answers to this blog in the discussion thread, except asking for clarifications. We do not want to spoil the fun for others. You can send in your answers to alokgoyal_2001@yahoo.com. In case your child solves a puzzle, please do let me know his/her name and age, and I will highlight it when I send in the answers the following week.
Finally, if there is an interesting puzzle that you have, please send it to me, I will post it on behalf with due acknowledgments.
Happy solving!
Puzzle #1: Firelog Puzzle
There are three friends (Mahesh, Ramesh and Suresh) who go for hunting to a jungle and decide to camp near a village. It was cold and they needed to light a fireplace. Each of them go out in search of wood. After an hour Mahesh comes back with 5 logs and Ramesh comes back with 3 logs. However, Suresh could not get any logs, and offered Rupees 8 to Mahesh and Ramesh as his equal share. How should Mahesh and Ramesh divide the money?
Ages: 10 and above (though I would encourage 8 and 9 year olds to try this as well)
Source: I read this puzzle in a Russian book about 30 years back. I had bought this book in a book fair in IIT Delhi. I was delighted to find this book in my mother’s apartment after all these years.
Alok Goyal's Puzzles Page 
Hi Alok, love the idea. Will you be posting the solution every week for the previous week’s puzzle?
Yes, will be sending the answers to the puzzles every week as well. trying to figure out if I can do this as a simple video.
Fantastic Idea. Best of luck
thank you sir
Alok: Great initiative. I love puzzles as well – so will keep a lookout for new ones here 🙂
Impeccable Timing as today is National puzzles day here in US. Very cool.
Nice to hear that today is the National puzzles day, I had no idea!
Great initiative Alok.
I read this in morning today:
Only three words in standard English begin with the letters ‘ dw’ and they are all common words. Name them.
Dwarf, Dwight and Dwindle
Dwight is a new word…….thanks.
What does it mean?
Three English words beginning with dw that I knew:
Dwarf, Dwell, Dwindle
Great stuff. Sent my answer
Ramesh is brilliant. He has taken the issue of negotiating the price off the table, by leaving the other two to figure out the split. Fantastic!
Pingback: Solution to Puzzle #1 | alokgoyal1971
Awesome, Alok. Thanks for doing this. My family (including Sam, 10, and Henry, 8) spent some good time on this. In the end, we figured out a story from Russia more than 30 years ago would have a socialist ending. More than likely, the state would appropriate the logs and the eight Rupees and then divide them all equally :).
We’ll look forward to the next one.
Would be great if you could integrate with Facebook and have comments here be Facebook comments – the likes and shares will allow many more readers to reach the blog. Haven’t used these myself, but http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook/ and https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comments/ seem to be the plugins you need.
thanks, will try the same. I am very new to blogging.