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August 01, 2005
Nuts to you
I'm walking around the second floor of the house last night, when I come across a book of Mensa mind challenges. I love a good mind challenge, I said, as I took the book. Boy, was I ever wrong.
Now, I like to think of myself as a fairly intelligent person. I'm no Einstein, but I can get it done. However, the Mensa puzzles were, for lack of a better term, asinine. Some of them were legitimate mind benders, but many of them involved ridiculous number sequences of something like "add 2 then multiply by 2, then add 3 and multiply by 3." I mean, I'm sure I sound like a whiny bitch, but come on!
One particular puzzle really got me fired up. It went something like this:
"A man wearing tattered jeans goes into a clothing store, takes a brand new pair of jeans and goes into a fitting room. He walks out wearing the new jeans without paying, and leaves the old jeans in the fitting room. He was not seen by any employee nor caught by any security camera, yet the police arrived at his door fifteen minutes later and arrested him. How did they know it was him?"
Hmm, was it some secret Jedi mind trick? Or maybe a police dog sniffed him down? Nope! The answer, according to Mensa, was that he left an envelope with his address on it in his back pocket. Of course! [My answer was that he had written his name on the jeans, so I would hope that is acceptable.] To me, that is not a mind-bender at all, it's simply an exercise in inventing a plausible reason something could have happened.
I've always thought the best kind of mind bender was the logic puzzle. And, sorry to say, many of these mind benders in the book weren't logic puzzles, just goofy sequences that a little guesswork could solve.
Posted by oz115 at August 1, 2005 09:02 AM