パズル事件史

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1. 第54期
   Game of Life (1970) — A Grid with Two Rules Gained the Power to Compute

   2026-10-07

   In October 1970, Martin Gardner's Scientific American column introduced Conway's one-player game Life. It has two rules: birth and survival. In November an MIT team found the glider gun, overturning the conjecture that finite patterns cannot grow forever. We trace its history as far as sources allow.

2. 第53期
   六边形折纸(1939) — 从笔记本上裁下的纸边，长出了隐藏的面

   2026-10-06

   1939年，普林斯顿大学研究生亚瑟·斯通把放不进笔记本的纸边折起来，发现了会换面的六边形。同伴中有费曼和图基。1956年12月，加德纳将其介绍给大众，从此广为人知。本文在所能确认的资料范围内追溯其来历。

3. 第52期
   马的巡游(约 840 年) — 抽走胜负的国际象棋,如何成为诗与数学

   2026-10-05

   用马步走遍棋盘 64 格的游戏,可追溯到九世纪的抄本与印度诗歌。1759 年欧拉论述了它,1823 年瓦恩斯多夫给出法则,1997 年计数得到确认。本文在所能确认的资料范围内追溯其来历。

4. 第51期
   汉诺塔(1883) — 数学家以化名推出的六十四片圆盘的传说

   2026-10-04

   1883 年,法国数学家卢卡斯以“暹罗的 N·克劳斯教授”之名,推出了一种使用三根柱子与圆盘的游戏。n 片圆盘的最少步数为 2 的 n 次方减 1。六十四片圆盘的传说,据计算需要约 5850 亿年。四根柱子情形下的最优性,由布什于 2014 年给出。本文在所能确认的资料范围内,追溯其来历。

5. 第50期
   八皇后问题(1848) — 把八个棋子摆得互不攻击。连高斯也数过的棋盘

   2026-10-03

   1848 年,国际象棋问题作者贝泽尔出题:“在 8×8 的棋盘上放 8 个皇后,使其互不攻击。”1850 年瑙克给出 92 种摆法,高斯也在书信中研究过。1971 年戴克斯特拉将其作为回溯的教材。本文在已确认的资料范围内,追溯这一句话的问题的来历。

6. 第49期
   Sprouts (1967) — A Two-Player Game of Dots and Lines on Paper That Resists Solving

   2026-10-02

   In 1967 John Conway and Michael Paterson at Cambridge devised Sprouts, a pencil-and-paper game for two, and Martin Gardner's July 1967 column spread it. Join dots, add a new dot on each line, and the game must end. Computers have charted who wins for each starting size, yet a conjecture remains.

7. 第48期
   Nim (1901) — The First Stone-Taking Game to Be Solved, and the Machines That Played It

   2026-10-01

   In 1901 Charles Bouton of Harvard named a stone-taking game 'Nim' and published its complete winning method. Write the heaps in binary, add column by column, and aim for zero: win and loss become visible. The logic grew into the Sprague–Grundy theorem and gave rise to game-playing machines, the 1940 Nimatron and the 1951 Nimrod. This essay traces what a solved game left to the history of puzzles and computing, using only facts that could be backed by sources.

8. 第47期
   Hex (1942) — The Year a Hexagon in the Corner of a Newspaper Ruled Out a Draw

   2026-09-29

   In 1942, a hexagonal board appeared in a newspaper in occupied Denmark. Six years later, John Nash independently rediscovered it at Princeton. From a proof that the game can never end in a draw to the modern genre of "connection games" and the lineage of game-playing AI, this traces what Hex left behind.

9. 第46期
   Instant Insanity (1967) — One Right Answer Among 41,472

   2026-09-25

   In 1967, Parker Brothers released a toy that was nothing more than four cubes stacked in a row: Instant Insanity. The rule was simple — make all four colors appear on every side of the stack. Yet there are 41,472 possible arrangements, and essentially only one way satisfies the condition. Its ancestor was a patented 1900 puzzle called the "Katzenjammer," known by the 1940s as "The Great Tantalizer." In 1947, a group of Cambridge students writing under a pseudonym solved that ancestor puzzle by turning it into a graph — colors as vertices, opposite faces as edges. This article traces the toy's origins, and how the tradition of treating puzzles as objects of computational-complexity theory reaches, half a century later, all the way to research on the Steam game Portal.

10. 第45期
    Sangaku (1683) — Votive Tablets Hung at Shrines Not to Thank the Gods for a Solved Problem, but to Challenge the Next Visitor to Solve One

    2026-09-24

    Sangaku are geometry problems painted on wooden votive tablets and dedicated at shrines and temples in Edo-period Japan. The earliest dated record is from 1683, and the oldest surviving tablet dates to 1686. Some were dedicated without an answer, as a challenge to the next visitor; one from 1822 recorded what is now called Soddy's hexlet, 115 years before its Western discovery. The spirit of building figures with only a compass and straightedge still lives on in puzzle games like Euclidea and Ecocoru.

11. 第44期
    Rush Hour (1996) — The Year a Wooden Traffic Jam Earned a PSPACE-Complete Proof

    2026-09-23

    Released in the US in 1996, the wooden sliding-block puzzle Rush Hour starts from one simple goal: slide a red car out of gridlock. In 2002 it was proven PSPACE-complete, and a quarter-century later it is still the subject of computer-science papers. This traces the history of the single board its inventor, Nob Yoshigahara, left behind.

12. 第43期
    Eternity Puzzle (1999) — The Year a £1 Million "Unsolvable" Fell in Seven Months

    2026-09-22

    Eternity, a flat tiling puzzle released in the UK in 1999, was marketed as unsolvable behind a one-million-pound prize. Contrary to inventor Christopher Monckton's own estimate, two Cambridge mathematicians reached a solution in just seven months. 209 pieces, 10^500 possible arrangements, and a solution found by discarding the inventor's own "clues" — this article traces that story, and the line of complexity-theory research it started that now reaches into today's Steam puzzle games.

13. 第42期
    Othello (1973) — The Year a Game Whose Patent Was Rejected Was Proven, Half a Century Later, to End in a Draw

    2026-09-21

    Othello: black and white discs on a green board, flipped by sandwiching the opponent's line. Goro Hasegawa of Japan sold it through Tsukuda in 1973. But the game had a 19th-century English forebear called Reversi, and the historical record includes two Englishmen publicly accusing each other of plagiarizing it. Hasegawa's own origin story changed too — the version he told at launch differs from the one he told from the 2000s onward. His attempt to register the rules (a Japanese utility model) was ultimately rejected, so no one has ever owned Othello's rules as it spread worldwide. In 1997, a computer named Logistello swept the reigning world champion six games to none. In 2023, mathematicians proved that perfect play by both sides ends in a draw. This piece follows the nearly 150-year lineage of a single flipping disc.

14. 第41期
    Pyraminx (1981) — Designed Before the Rubik's Cube, Released to Ride Its Boom

    2026-09-19

    The Pyraminx is a tetrahedral twisty puzzle: each of its four faces is divided into nine triangles, and only the vertices and edges actually need to be solved. Its inventor, Uwe Mèffert, is said to have worked out the basic mechanism around 1971 — before Ernő Rubik even conceived the Cube in 1974. But Mèffert held off, securing patents in multiple countries, and only brought it to market in 1981 through Tomy, riding the Rubik's Cube boom he had arrived too early for. It reportedly sold over ten million units in its first year and roughly ninety million within three. Unlike the Cube, where every piece's move affects every other piece, the Pyraminx's four corner tips spin freely without touching the rest of the puzzle at all — a different design lesson about which parts of a mechanism actually need to be connected.

15. 第40期
    Nine Linked Rings (Baguenaudier) (1872) — The Year an Origin-Unknown Ring Puzzle Turned Out to Use Binary Math 81 Years Before a Telegraph Engineer Patented the Same Idea

    2026-09-18

    Nine Linked Rings, or Baguenaudier: remove rings from a bar one at a time until the last one slides free. Its origin is said to be China, but nothing is settled; the earliest confirmed records are a 16th-century Chinese text and, around the same time, the writings of Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli. In 1872, Lyon mathematics enthusiast Louis Gros became the first to theorize the puzzle's solution as a binary table. The same idea was independently reinvented 81 years later, in 1953, when telegraph engineer Frank Gray patented what communications engineers now call the "Gray code." As a physical puzzle, a 1970 patent by William Keister became "Spin-Out," an early product of Binary Arts (founded 1985, now ThinkFun), still sold today. This piece follows the 150-year lineage of a single ring mechanism.

16. 第39期
    The Seven Bridges of Königsberg (1736) — The Year Euler Erased the Map to Solve a Sunday Puzzle

    2026-09-17

    The answer is simple. In 1736, the mathematician Leonhard Euler proved that no walk existed that crossed all seven bridges of the Prussian town of Königsberg exactly once and returned to its start. The town's four landmasses were connected by 5, 3, 3, and 3 bridges respectively — all odd numbers. His paper, "Solutio problematis ad geometriam situs pertinentis," was presented on August 26, 1735, and published in 1741. By reducing landmasses to points and bridges to lines, Euler founded what became graph theory — the same logic taught in schools today as the rule for "one-stroke" drawing puzzles. This article traces how that 290-year-old proof still shapes the design of today's routing puzzle games, from Cosmic Express to Lyne to Mini Metro.

17. 第38期
    Peg Solitaire (1697) — The Day a Game With No Inventor Became the Math of Proving "Unsolvable"

    2026-09-16

    On a cross-shaped board of pegs, you jump one peg over its neighbor and remove it, again and again, hoping to end with a single peg left. The earliest record of Peg Solitaire appears in 1697, in the French court periodical Mercure Galant under Louis XIV. No inventor is known. The popular legend that a prisoner in the Bastille devised it traces back no further than an English book from 1801, and puzzle historian John Beasley calls it unsupported by any earlier French source. In 1912 Ernest Bergholt found an 18-move solution to the classic problem; in 1982 Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays introduced the "pagoda function," a tool for proving certain positions mathematically unreachable. In 2007 the board resurfaced as puzzles inside Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box. This piece traces a single ruleset that has been played for over three centuries without ever needing a named inventor.

18. 第37期
    Hitori (1990) — Why a Puzzle Too Hard to Catch On for 8 Years Is Still an AI Test Case in 2025

    2026-09-15

    Hitori — first published as a reader submission in Puzzle Communication Nikoli issue #29 in March 1990 — is a logic puzzle built from just three rules: no duplicate numbers, no adjacent black cells, and no disconnection. It was too hard to catch on at first, taking eight years to find its footing. Yet it was ported to the Nintendo DS in 2007, proven NP-complete by Robert Hearn and Erik Demaine in 2009, and in 2025 became the subject of an AI research paper on explaining puzzle solutions. This traces how far three reader-submitted rules have carried across 35 years.

19. 第36期
    Mastermind (1970) — A Telecoms Engineer's Four Colors, Later Reborn as Fallout's Hacking Screen

    2026-09-14

    In 1970, Israeli telecommunications engineer Mordecai Meirowitz devised Mastermind, a game that reveals only a count of hits and near-misses from four hidden color pegs. Rejected by major toy companies, it was released by Invicta Plastics in 1971 and sold over 30 million sets within the decade. In 1976 Donald Knuth showed it could be solved in five moves or fewer, and in 2007 a Bethesda programmer built it directly into Fallout 3's hacking minigame. This piece traces how a half-century-old constraint — telling the player only a number, never the answer — still shapes puzzle design in the age of Wordle.

20. 第35期
    The Decagon House Murders (1987) — The Debut That Answered Knox's Decalogue

    2026-09-12

    In 1987, Yukito Ayatsuji's debut novel The Decagon House Murders trapped university students - each bearing the name of a Golden Age Western mystery writer - inside a ten-sided mansion on a deserted island, igniting Japan's "Shin Honkaku" (new-orthodox) mystery movement. Behind it lies a rulebook for fair play with the reader: S. S. Van Dine's 1928 Twenty Rules and Ronald Knox's 1929 Decalogue. That same rulebook is still cited today, down to Ryukishi07's Umineko no Naku Koro ni, a mystery game sold on Steam.

21. 第34期
    SameGame (1985) — The Grammar of Clearing Same-Colored Clusters, Born From a Reader Submission

    2026-09-10

    In 1985, a program called Chain Shot!, submitted to the Japanese magazine Monthly ASCII, wrote the rule of clearing adjacent same-colored blocks in one tap. Over the next forty years the rule kept changing its name — SameGame, Clickomania!, Jawbreaker — while becoming the subject of a solving algorithm in 2012 and an AI-reasoning benchmark in 2024. Its author's name has nearly been forgotten, but the rule itself lives on.

22. 第33期
    Himitsu-bako (1894) — The Souvenir That Never Explains How to Open It

    2026-09-09

    In 1894, in a hot-spring town in Hakone, a wooden box took its familiar form. Under its geometric marquetry sat a mechanism that only opened through a fixed sequence of moves — with no instructions attached. This piece traces the same design grammar found in today's escape rooms back to a single 132-year-old box.

23. 第32期
    Pigs in Clover (1889) — A Tilting Wooden Box That Stalled the U.S. Senate for a Season

    2026-09-08

    In 1889, a single wooden box brought the United States to a standstill. Under a sheet of glass, four tiny marble "pigs" sat in a spiral maze; the only tool was gravity, tilting the board to herd all four into the center pen. Senators and newspapermen alike stopped mid-sentence for it. The inventor was Charles Martin Crandall, who patented it on September 10, 1889. Two years later, puzzle writer Sam Loyd claimed he'd invented it himself, and for decades the record blurred. A craze that got itself mocked in a White House political cartoon deserves, I think, to be read again as one of the first mobile games.

24. 第31期
    Eggerland (1985) — The Original One-Room Puzzle Where You Push Your Enemies as Eggs

    2026-09-06

    In 1985, a modest puzzle game appeared for the MSX home computer: Eggerland Mystery. Shoot an enemy to turn it into a pushable egg, then collect hearts to open the treasure box — a design built from just a handful of verbs, contained entirely within one room. HAL Laboratory refined that grammar across a run of Famicom Disk System titles, and in 1989 it crossed the ocean as Adventures of Lolo. Sitting in the producer's chair for those two years was a young Satoru Iwata, years before he became Nintendo's president.

25. 第30期
    Shanghai (1986) — The Rules a Hospital PLATO Terminal Wrote

    2026-08-26

    In 1986, Activision released Shanghai, a simple puzzle of clearing mahjong tiles two at a time. But its roots trace to 1981, when a paralyzed student coded it on a hospital PLATO terminal. A historian's look at the 45-year lineage that followed.

26. 第29期
    Book of Lenses (2008) — A Hundred Ways to Look at a Game

    2026-08-25

    Published in 2008, The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses introduced 100 questions for looking at a game. A historian's look at where that idea came from, and how it still reaches today's puzzle designers.

27. 第28期
    The MDA Framework (2004) — Three Words Puzzle Designers Still Use

    2026-08-23

    In 2004, a few-page paper presented at an AAAI workshop reshaped the vocabulary of game design. Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubek formalized Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics. This piece follows those three words from Doug Church's unfinished 1999 homework, through a GDC workshop room, into the real project Oasis, and onto the shelf we now call Steam.

28. 第27期
    Sudoku (1979) — How a Nameless Invention Conquered the World's Morning Papers

    2026-08-22

    In 1979, a puzzle called 'Number Place' appeared, uncredited, in an American magazine. This piece traces the 25 years it took to become Sudoku — refined by Japan's Nikoli, carried by a retired Hong Kong judge's homemade program, and finally landing in a London newspaper in 2004 — and the 'logic only, no guessing' design principle that still lives on in the 2024 Steam puzzle collection Islands of Insight.

29. 第26期
    The Art of Computer Game Design (1984) — The First Book That Tried to Define What a Game Is

    2026-08-21

    In 1984, Chris Crawford — a game designer who had just been laid off by Atari — wrote a book: The Art of Computer Game Design. It was the world's first serious attempt to define a game itself, through four elements: representation, interaction, conflict, and safety. This essay traces the early-1980s context that produced the book, the small living-room gathering he started the following years that grew into today's GDC, and why his definition still fuels academic debate today.

30. 第25期
    Hakoiri Musume / Klotski (1930s) — The Lineage of Blocks That Trapped Cao Cao

    2026-08-19

    In the West as a patent drawing, in China as a paper cutout re-enacting Cao Cao's defeat, and in Japan as a wooden toy called Hakoiri Musume — nearly the same sliding-block puzzle arose independently in three places between the 1890s and the 1930s, with no evidence any referenced the others. Martin Gardner published its 81-move optimal solution in Scientific American in 1964; Microsoft's Windows Entertainment Pack carried it to PCs worldwide in 1991. This is the record of that parallel evolution, up to 2021's Blockee on Steam, which names Klotski as its inspiration in its own words.

31. 第24期
    Hashiwokakero (1990) — Thirty-Six Years of Logic Grown from Numbers Joined by Lines

    2026-08-18

    In 1990, Hashiwokakero debuted in Puzzle Communication Nikoli #31. Its rule — connect numbered islands with bridges until everything forms one network — grew out of an earlier prototype, "Ketsugoshu," that the same contributor "renin" had published in issue #28 the year before. In 2009 it was proven NP-complete; in 2004 it reached Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection ahead of any Steam release; and in 2023 Nikoli itself ported it to Switch, PC, and Xbox. This article verifies a 36-year lineage.

32. 第23期
    Minesweeper (1990) — The Logic Puzzle Microsoft Built Into a Billion PCs

    2026-08-17

    On 8 October 1990, a small game shipped as one of seven titles in the Windows Entertainment Pack. From 1992's Windows 3.1 onward it came preinstalled on nearly every PC running Windows, and its lineage is said to trace back to Mined-Out, a 1983 ZX Spectrum game by British programmer Ian Andrew. This article follows the genealogy of a logic puzzle nobody set out to design as one — up to 2017's Tametsi, which stripped out the probability and returned the form to pure deduction.

33. 第22期
    Mirror Isles / Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes (2014-2015) — How Two Free Jam Games Became Two Different Escape Islands, a Decade Later

    2026-08-06

    In 2014 and 2015, London puzzle designer Alan Hazelden wrote two free PuzzleScript jam games, Mirror Isles and Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes. By his own account on his website, the former is the spiritual ancestor of his 2020 commercial release A Monster's Expedition, and both games are also credited as one inspiration and starting point for Jonathan Blow's new game Order of the Sinking Star, whose demo appeared in 2026. This piece traces, using only the developer's own words, how two weeks-long free experiments fed into two very different commercial puzzle games over more than a decade.

34. 第21期
    Nurikabe (1991) — A Ban on Two-by-Two, Borrowed from a Yōkai's Name

    2026-08-05

    In 1991, Nurikabe debuted under the pen name "renin" in the reader-development column of Puzzle Communication Nikoli #33. Its four rules — size islands by number, connect the rest into a single black sea, and never allow a two-by-two black block — weren't even expected to catch on by the magazine's own editors. In 2004 it was proven NP-complete; its "no two-by-two" rule was inherited by LITS; and in 2025, Steam's Nurikabe World brought the puzzle back under its own name. This article verifies a 34-year lineage.

35. 第20期
    Masyu (2000) — The Loop of Black and White Pearls Born from a Misreading

    2026-08-03

    In April 1999, Puzzle Communication Nikoli issue #84 published a puzzle format called "Pearl Necklace," using nothing but white circles. In 2000, issue #90 added black circles and renamed it "White Pearl, Black Pearl," completing the logical skeleton Masyu still uses today. The official name "Masyu" wasn't settled until 2003 — the result of Nikoli's president misreading a kanji, an accident that simply stuck. With sources, we trace how a grid using no numbers or letters survived 26 years across an NP-completeness proof, official console ports, and an open-source implementation.

36. 第19期
    Soma Cube (1933) — Twenty-Seven Fragments Born in a Quantum Mechanics Lecture

    2026-08-02

    In 1933, half-listening to a lecture on quantum mechanics in Copenhagen, Piet Hein enumerated every non-convex fragment that could be made by joining four or fewer unit cubes by their faces, and produced the seven-piece, 27-cube Soma cube. Popularized worldwide by Martin Gardner's 1958 column and commercialized by Parker Brothers in 1969, its 240 solutions were later hand-solved by John Conway and Michael Guy, and its debt is acknowledged by none other than Rubik's Cube inventor Erno Rubik. This piece traces ninety years of a solid-dissection puzzle lineage.

37. 第18期
    Get Off the Earth (1896) — The Patent Sam Loyd Took Out on a Miscount

    2026-07-31

    In 1896, puzzle columnist Sam Loyd patented a rotating vanishing puzzle called Get Off the Earth. This piece traces the real mechanism behind its disappearing figure, its 1880 predecessor The Magic Egg Puzzle, its roots in Loyd's 1858 Trick Mules, and the trail this rearrangement trick has left in optical-illusion puzzles today.

38. 第17期
    数字连线（1897）——从报纸解谜专栏，到 Flow Free 与 Zip 的时代

    2026-07-30

    1897年，解谜作家 Sam Loyd 在《布鲁克林每日鹰报》刊登了《困惑的邻居们》。1917年，Henry Ernest Dudeney 在自己的著作中将其打磨成一款驾车者谜题；1980年代，Nikoli 将其引入日本，命名为 Arukone 与 Numberlink（数字连线）。2012年，Big Duck Games 的《Flow Free》把它变成彩色圆点与管道，下载量突破一亿；到2025年，这一脉系谱延伸至领英（LinkedIn）的每日谜题《Zip》。本文追溯这条已有120余年历史的规则——不交叉地画出一条线——是如何存活至今的。

39. 第16期
    五格骨牌（1965）——Solomon W. Golomb 命名的五方块图形，如何演变为 Tetris

    2026-07-29

    1965年，美国数学家 Solomon W. Golomb 在其著作《Polyominoes》中，将由五个正方形连接而成的十二种图形「五格骨牌（pentomino）」的理论整理成书。这一命名可追溯到1953年哈佛大学的一次演讲，1957年经由 Martin Gardner 的专栏传到普通读者手中，1975年又发行了俄语译本。到了1984年，莫斯科的青年 Alexey Pajitnov 凭借童年时对五格骨牌的记忆，在一台实验用计算机上移动图形，Tetris 由此诞生。本文追溯这一五方块图形耗时三十余年环游世界的历程。

40. 第15期
    Yajilin (1999) — A Board Where Two Rule-Systems Were Grafted Together

    2026-07-28

    In July 1999, Puzzle Communication Nikoli issue #86 introduced Yajilin, a hybrid pencil puzzle that grafted the "draw exactly one loop" grammar established by 1989's Slitherlink onto a black-cell-counting rule. It reused the arrow-and-number cell from a puzzle published just before it, Yajisan-Kazusan, and by 2005 had already been adopted, as "Arrow Ring," into the US qualifying round of the World Puzzle Championship. From official Xbox and PS Vita ports to a dedicated 2025 mobile app called Loopr, we trace, with sources, 26 years of this grid's survival.

41. 第14期
    卡库罗（1966）——从 Cross Sums 到加算 Cross，六十年不曾移动的加法格子

    2026-07-25

    卡库罗，英语圈称为 Cross Sums，1966年诞生于美国戴尔公司的一款拼图杂志企划。1980年代，Nikoli 将其引入日本，命名为“加算 Cross”，2005年又经由《卫报》以近乎逆向输出的方式传遍世界。本文将追溯这个既非填字游戏也非数独、专攻加法的格子，为何在六十年间不断更换媒介却始终未曾改变规则，行文将同时参照当年的纸面报道与如今的 Steam 商店页面。

42. 第13期
    Slitherlink (1989) — Loop-Closing Logic Born From a Two-Player Paper Game

    2026-07-23

    In June 1989, barely half a year into the Heisei era, Puzzle Communication Nikoli #26 introduced a new puzzle format. Adapted from a two-player paper game called Slither into a single-player pencil puzzle, Slitherlink offers a paradoxical solving pleasure — proving where lines cannot go rather than where they can — and carries a nearly 38-year lineage running through NP-completeness proofs to Steam storefronts in the 2020s. We trace, with sources, the loop-logic Nikoli founder Maki Kaji once called "the son of Sudoku."

43. 第12期
    PuzzleScript(2013)——一行规则，量产了全世界的「推箱子游戏」

    2026-07-20

    2013年10月，Stephen Lavelle(increpare)免费公开了浏览器解谜引擎 PuzzleScript。这个只需一行规则就能做出仓库番类谜题的工具，经由 Alan Hazelden 的早期作品，孕育出《A Good Snowman Is Hard to Build》，又经过 Hempuli 本人所说的“推箱子谜题复兴”，一路连到了《Baba Is You》的土壤。本文核实这条系谱。

44. 第11期
    花山 Cast Puzzle（1983）——Nob Yoshigahara 连结金属拼图与数字密室游戏的谱系

    2026-07-19

    1983年，日本玩具制造商花山（Hanayama）推出了金属分解拼图系列「Cast Puzzle」。负责监修的拼图设计师 Nob Yoshigahara（1936-2004）之手，无意间将这段无文字的金属拼图经验，与1996年的滑块拼图《Rush Hour》，以及2012年问世、后登陆Steam的密室拼图《The Room》连接了起来。本文追溯这条历经40年仍未完全解开的谱系。

45. 第10期
    Tangram (Qi Qiao Ban) — Around 1810, Seven Pieces of Lies and Truth

    2026-07-12

    Seven shapes, five triangles, one square, one parallelogram, enough to form countless silhouettes. The tangram's origin lies in late-18th-century China, but its history was long distorted by a fabricated chronicle puzzle maker Sam Loyd wrote in 1903. I dig up both the toy's true voyage and the fiction that obscured it.

46. 第9期
    真人密室逃脱游戏(2007)——从京都的两个房间走向全世界的密室

    2026-07-10

    2007年7月7日，京都的画廊「Inspiblo」。作为免费报纸『SCRAP』三周年派对的余兴节目，加藤隆生将约100名参与者分成14支队伍，举办了一场以两个房间为舞台的解谜活动。这便是后来被称为「真人密室逃脱游戏（Real Escape Game）」、并成长为遍布全球商业设施之现象的第一夜。加藤本人证言称，其契机源于对网页密室逃脱游戏的痴迷。我将这一夜解读为屏幕中的谜题迈入现实空间这一罕见事件的记录。

47. 第8期
    Henry Dudeney (1907) — Four Hinged Pieces That Turn a Triangle Into a Square

    2026-07-08

    In 1907, English puzzle maker Henry Dudeney published, within The Canterbury Puzzles, the Haberdasher's Puzzle: cutting an equilateral triangle into just four pieces that reform into a square. Hinged together, the pieces could transform with a single fold, and the dissection drew attention in its day -- yet the proof that four pieces were truly minimal remained unresolved for a surprisingly long time, settled only by a 2024 computational-geometry paper. Tracing Dudeney's rivalry with Sam Loyd and his rediscovery through Martin Gardner, this piece rereads how a paper puzzle took 117 years to reach computer science.

48. 第7期
    The Birth of the Jigsaw Puzzle (1760s) — The Man Who Cut Up Maps, and a Verb Unchanged for 260 Years

    2026-07-07

    In 1760s London, the map engraver John Spilsbury mounted printed maps on wood and cut them apart along national borders, selling them as 'Dissected Maps' — the commercial starting point of what would later be called the jigsaw puzzle. This essay revisits the context in which the format was born as a tool for teaching geography, the structural insight that where you cut is itself the design, and the lineage that runs from Depression-era die-cut cardboard to the 2021 VR title Puzzling Places — a format that survived 260 years without ever changing its verb.

49. 第6期
    Nikoli (1980) — The Reader-Grown Puzzle Magazine, and the Road Sudoku Took Around the World

    2026-07-02

    Puzzle Communication Nikoli, launched in 1980, was Japan's first magazine devoted to puzzles. Its name came from a racehorse; the prototype of Sudoku came from America. This essay traces forty years in which Nikoli's mode of production—reader submissions and handmade problems—gave birth to Slitherlink (1989) and Nurikabe (1991), and sent Sudoku around the world via Hong Kong judge Wayne Gould's generator program, rereading the source of a question at the heart of modern puzzle design: who should make a good problem?

50. 第5期
    Professor Layton and the Curious Village (2007) - A Vessel That Carried 1966's Riddles onto a Handheld

    2026-07-01

    On February 15, 2007, Level-5 released Professor Layton and the Curious Village for the Nintendo DS. Its bundle of riddles derives directly from Akira Tago's Atama no Taisou (Kobunsha, 1966), the puzzle books producer Akihiro Hino adored as a child. This essay traces, from a historian's view, how Layton's stance of sinking a paper puzzle collection into a narrative vessel connects a forty-year-old book to a handheld, and onward to today's deduction puzzles.

51. 第4期
    纵横字谜（1913）—— 从阿瑟·温的菱形开始的格子谱系

    2026-06-30

    1913年12月21日，阿瑟·温的"Word-Cross"印刷于《纽约世界报》娱乐副刊。这一游戏因排版误植而被称为"纵横字谜"，1924年西蒙与舒斯特出版社的书籍令其广泛传播，1930年《泰晤士报》、1942年《纽约时报》使之走向全球。本文追溯格子、交叉与线索这三项发明，如何作为思考型解谜的设计语汇，从纸上方格延续至尼科利的铅笔谜题与现代数字作品。

52. 第3期
    河内塔（1883）—— 留下递归遗产、永无终结的64枚圆盘

    2026-06-29

    1883年，法国数学家Édouard Lucas以「N. Claus (de Siam)」为笔名推出了一款木制玩具。三根柱子，大小各异的圆盘，仅有两条规则。然而其朴素外表之下，蕴含着移动n枚圆盘至少需要2ⁿ−1步的递归数学。本文从历史视角重新审视这款玩具的真正起源、贝纳勒斯关于64枚圆盘完成时世界将终结的虚构传说，以及「递归」与「状态空间」的思想为后世计算机科学与现代谜题所留下的遗产。

53. 第2期
    魔方（1974）——43京种配置的迷宫，与唯一一个解

    2026-06-25

    1974年，布达佩斯的建筑师厄尔诺·鲁比克为教学目的削出了一个小小的立方体，这个物体最终将拥有43京种配置、唯一一个完成形的"状态空间"握于掌心。本文通过一次和二次文献，追溯这一玩具的确切出处——1974年的发明、1980年的全球登场，以及2010年证明的"神之数=20"——并作为历史重新解读：这个没有显示屏、没有电源的物体，是如何在半世纪前便以实物体现了现代解谜设计者口中的"可逆性""唯一解""待探索的空间"等语汇的。

54. 第1期
    15数字推盘（1880） — 萨姆·劳埃德骗倒世界的那一步无解棋局

    2026-06-16

    1880年初，「15数字推盘」的狂潮席卷美国与欧洲。然而被世人奉为发明者的萨姆·劳埃德，实为在狂潮消退十六年后才冒领功劳的冒充者。本文追溯这个木盒的真实来源，以及劳埃德以悬赏为名的「14与15对调的盘面」在数学上绝对无解的1879年证明，并从历史角度重读滑块拼图留给现代数字谜题设计的遗产：「可解性的保证」。