Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Ready, SET...

I don't know where I saw this - probably in someone's blog, just like you're seeing this. I'm not usually much of a puzzle person. I've never even tried sudoku! It's not that I don't enjoy games and other things that exercise my mind (I spent 20 years learning Japanese - I could speak OK but only got to a second grade reading level - kanji characters are great puzzles!). It's more a fear of becoming addicted to yet another time sink...

But I tried SET anyway, and it's pretty cool. You have to find sets of three objects that meet the "all same" or "all different" rules on the four properties (color, symbol, number, and shading). It feels like a mild left and right brain workout - a bit of pattern recognition, logic, and short term memory. At first it looks easy, but finding that sixth set can take some time. I did notice some improvement on my third puzzle so I guess I'm starting to see some method in this even though I don't really know what it is.

You can find a daily SET puzzle here, and the New York Times has more here.

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