Puzzle Solving Quotes & Sayings

Instruction tables will have to be made up by mathematicians with computing experience and perhaps a certain puzzle-solving ability. There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself. — Alan Turing

Music is a lot more like solving an intricate puzzle with moments of pure, random creative bliss ... whereas painting is much more purely random creative bliss with moments of problem solving. — Brandon Boyd

In the same way he's fascinated by crosswords, the puzzle of solving the murder is what drives him on. — John Thaw

A knotty puzzle may hold a scientist up for a century, when it may be that a colleague has the solution already and is not even aware of the puzzle that it might solve. — Isaac Asimov

I greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss's The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century's most mysterious writers. — Paul Theroux

For me, writing a novel is like solving a puzzle. But I don't intend my novels as puzzles. I intend them as invitations to dance. — Mohsin Hamid

When I came to Harvard, I was debating between math and science, and I guess I thought in the end I wanted something that could connect to the real world. I liked puzzle-solving and connections. — Lisa Randall

Racism watching is a puzzle solving activity and often involves debunking pseudo-science. The investigator must try to figure out what makes people believe in weird ideas. As Stieg said in an interview, 'Fifty years later, people still believe in this; the whole Neo-Nazi movement. There is absolutely no sense in this. They do it contrary to everything science tells us. Contrary to human goodness or altruism, contrary to rational thinking. And this is fascinating, why? — Eric Bronson

There's a structure to a detective story that I can easily understand. I understand playing that particular game. It's like solving a puzzle. Or creating a puzzle. — Christopher Bollen

He compared the intelligence task to solving a jigsaw puzzle, except that you didn't get the box cover, so you didn't know what the final picture was. And you got only a few pieces at a time, not all of them. And even worse, you always got a bunch of pieces from some other puzzle thrown in. — P. W. Singer

I became an actor because I love solving problems. I'm a big crossword puzzle person. I love doing research. One of the reasons I became Jewish is because I love text study. — Anthony Heald

I have a really hard time connecting to music that doesn't feel like I'm somehow solving a puzzle that applies to my life. — Andrew McMahon

I like to edit my sentences as I write them. I rearrange a sentence many times before moving on to the next one. For me, that editing process feels like a form of play, like a puzzle that needs solving, and it's one of the most satisfying parts of writing. — Karen Thompson Walker

Poetry is like a puzzle-solving strategy for me. I like to poem my way through tricky questions and ideas. That's about the only consistent thread through my poem-creation process. — Sarah Kay

Mystery writing involves solving a puzzle, but 'high suspense' writing is a situation whereby the writer thrusts the hero/heroine into high drama. — Iris Johansen

The most common anxiety I hear about learning to program is that people think it requires a lot of math. Actually, most programming doesn't require math beyond basic arithmetic. In fact, being good at programming isn't that different from being good at solving Sudoku puzzles. To solve a Sudoku puzzle, the numbers 1 through 9 must be filled in for each row, each column, and each 3x3 interior square of the full 9x9 board. You find a solution by applying deduction and logic from the starting numbers. For — Albert Sweigart

Actually solving the puzzles in the book isn't going to improve anyone's writing, but "trying to solve the puzzle" is one way to think about what a lot of us - writers and other artists - do every day. Step one is to recognize the problem, step two is deciding what constraints you want to impose or respect, and step three is finding a pleasing/surprising/exciting solution. — Peter Turchi

Winston Breen was solving a puzzle, but then Winston Breen was always solving a puzzle. — Eric Berlin

In general, advertising isn't a "creative" atmosphere. It's a business atmosphere and your job is puzzle solving. My favorite aspect of the business, I guess, was presenting to clients. What I enjoyed least were the clients. Worried corporate brand managers, trying to dumb-down their ads for the stupid American population. I hated the disrespect that these people had for "consumers." — Augusten Burroughs

It was like solving a complex math puzzle without any promise that an optimal solution existed. — James S.A. Corey

So intent was Frank upon solving the puzzle of Lemarchand's box that he didn't hear the great bell begin to ring. — Clive Barker

I think of each movie as a puzzle. The fun is in solving the puzzle: finding a musical identity for the picture, however that can be summed up. — Marco Beltrami

You find when you're writing a detective story that you're actually not trying to solve anything. You're trying to stop the reader from solving the puzzle. — Christopher Bollen

Human nature presents human minds with a puzzle which they have not yet solved and may never succeed in solving, for all that we can tell. The dichotomy of a human being into 'soul' and 'body' is not a datum of experience. No one has ever been, or ever met, a living human soul without a body ... Someone who accepts - as I myself do, taking it on trust - the present-day scientific account of the Universe may find it impossible to believe that a living creature, once dead, can come to life again; but, if he did entertain this belief, he would be thinking more 'scientifically' if he thought in the Christian terms of a psychosomatic resurrection than if he thought in the shamanistic terms of a disembodied spirit. — Arnold Joseph Toynbee

Marriage is a million piece puzzle, a pristine and exciting pursuit at the beginning that gradually becomes a daunting task, usually more challenging than anticipated. It is only those truly committed to solving that puzzle who witness in the end the miraculous outcome of every tiny piece laid out and pressed together in an inspiring and envious creation - a treasure only time, resoluteness, and perseverance could create. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man. — Maria Goeppert-Mayer

INTRODUCTION The Puzzling Puzzles of Harry Harlow and Edward Deci In the middle of the last century, two young scientists conducted experiments that should have changed the world - but did not. Harry F. Harlow was a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin who, in the 1940s, established one of the world's first laboratories for studying primate behavior. One day in 1949, Harlow and two colleagues gathered eight rhesus monkeys for a two-week experiment on learning. The researchers devised a simple mechanical puzzle like the one pictured on the next page. Solving it required three steps: pull out the vertical pin, undo the hook, and lift the hinged cover. Pretty easy for you and me, far more challenging for a thirteen-pound — Daniel H. Pink

It starts off like climbing a tree or solving a puzzle - poetry, if nothing else, is just fun to write. But deeper into each and every piece, you no longer hesitate to call it work. It's passion. A poet's sense of lyrical accomplishment is then his food and water, his means of survival. — Criss Jami

Devising a mechanism is a lot like solving a puzzle - and gives you the same kind of kick. — Eric Maskin

Every person is a puzzle with a password. By solving the puzzle, the potential for emotional and physical intimacy is realized. — Zack Love

'Toybox' is that kind of game that will stretch your mental capacity by doing very simple things like solving an easy puzzle of shooting aliens. You'll just need to do everything at the same time to make it through alive. Just to make things tricky, the tasks change every week so you can't get used to any set. — Rob Manuel

I can't live without my smartphone, but I really geek on coding. It's not so much technology that I like, but puzzle solving. — Sylvia Day

I've got a PowerPoint deck that I use for internal presentations, and there's a slide on it that asks, 'What percentage of your game is combat versus exploration versus puzzle solving versus platforming,' and I refuse to answer that question. — Warren Spector

The greatest puzzle in the world, young man, the greatest challenge a man can face, a solving the riddle of a women's heart. — Steve Hamilton

But I was beginning to feel like it all fit together, the same way everything in the bowl ends up in the bisquits, as Amma would say. — Kami Garcia

I write poetry to figure things out. Any time I'm trying to wrap my head around something, poetry is like a puzzle-solving strategy for me. — Sarah Kay

When you make weirdness into a puzzle to be solved, you make LOST — Joseph Fink

Not every puzzle is intended to be solved. Some are in place to test your limits. Others are, in fact, not puzzles at all ... — Vera Nazarian

The writers job is like solving a puzzle, and finally arriving at a solution is a tremendous satisfaction. — William Zinsser

By standard intelligence texts, the dogs have failed at the puzzle. I believe, by contrast that they have succeeded magnificently. They have applied a novel tool to the task. We are that tool. Dogs have learned this
and they see us as fine general-purpose tools, too: useful for protection, acquiring food, providing companionship. We solve the puzzles of closed doors and empty water dishes. In the folk psychology of dogs, we humans are brilliant enough to extract hopelessly tangled leashes from around trees; we can conjure up an endless bounty of foodstuffs and things to chew. How savvy we are in dogs' eyes! It's a clever strategy to turn to us after all. The question of the cognitive abilities of dogs is thereby transformed; dogs are terrific at using humans to solve problems, but not as good at solving problems when we're not around. — Alexandra Horowitz