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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

0:11:23.000,0:11:25.000
if you want to try it yourself. Thank you.

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(Applause)