Puzzles.

A unique compilation of logical teasers and lateral-thinking problems designed to stretch your brainpower and strengthen your mind. Riddles, paradoxes, and conundrums have been confusing and confounding people since at least the time of the Ancient Greeks. The eponymous riddle, according to legend, was devised by Albert Einstein as a child. He claimed that only about 2% of the population would be able to work out the correct answer. There are no tricks and there is only one answer. It requires the cool application of logic to solve. And a lot of patience. Einstein's Riddle features fifty of the toughest logic problems, lateral thinking puzzles, and tests of mental agility. By turns entertaining and infuriating, the puzzles challenge our preconceptions, tell us about how we reason, and provide a rigorous intellectual workout.

Einstein devised a riddle when he was a child. He predicted that only 2 per cent of the world's population would be able to solve it. Can you? But solving it is just the first of many challenges. Here are some of the most mesmerising conundrums ever conceived.

Step into the mind of the greatest physicist of all time Try to think like Einstein as you come to grips with 120 enigmas, quizzes, and tests of logic based on his greatest work: the theory of relativity, E=mc2, Brownian Motion, zero-point gravity, and many other groundbreaking ideas, all woven into some of the best puzzles ever. With so many incredible discoveries to draw on, plus a selection of Einstein's most illuminating quotes and over 200 illustrations, this lavishly produced book will open the door to a range of stunning scientific concepts. As the great man once said: "You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else"--a challenge that all puzzle enthusiasts will find irresistible.

Keeping students involved and actively learning is challenging. Instructors in computer science are aware of the cognitive value of modelling puzzles and often use logical puzzles as an efficient pedagogical instrument to engage students and develop problem-solving skills. This unique book is a comprehensive resource that offers teachers and students fun activities to teach and learn logic. It provides new, complete, and running formalisation in Propositional and First Order Logic for over 130 logical puzzles, including Sudoku-like puzzles, zebra-like puzzles, island of truth, lady and tigers, grid puzzles, strange numbers, or self-reference puzzles. Solving puzzles with theorem provers can be an effective cognitive incentive to motivate students to learn logic. They will find a ready-to-use format which illustrates how to model each puzzle, provides running implementations, and explains each solution. This concise and easy-to-follow textbook is a much-needed support tool for students willing to explore beyond the introductory level of learning logic and lecturers looking for examples to heighten student engagement in their computer science courses.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, PRICAI 2008, held in Hanoi, Vietnam, in December 2008. The 49 revised long papers, 33 revised regular papers, and 32 poster papers presented together with 1 keynote talk and 3 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 234 submissions. The papers address all current issues of modern AI research with topics such as AI foundations, knowledge representation, knowledge acquisition and ontologies, evolutionary computation, etc. as well as various exciting and innovative applications of AI to many different areas. Particular importance is attached to the areas of machine learning and data mining, intelligent agents, language and speech processing, information retrieval and extraction.

A renowned astrophysicist’s approachable introduction to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and its application in our daily lives. It is commonly assumed that if the Sun suddenly turned into a black hole, it would suck Earth and the rest of the planets into oblivion. Yet, as prominent author and astrophysicist Jeffrey Bennett points out, black holes don't suck. With that simple idea in mind, Bennett begins an entertaining introduction to Einstein's theories of relativity, describing the amazing phenomena readers would actually experience if they took a trip to a black hole. The theory of relativity reveals the speed of light as the cosmic speed limit, the mind-bending ideas of time dilation and curvature of spacetime, and what may be the most famous equation in history: E = mc2. Indeed, the theory of relativity shapes much of our modern understanding of the universe. It is not “just a theory”―every major prediction of relativity has been tested to exquisite precision, and its practical applications include the Global Positioning System (GPS). Amply illustrated and written in clear, accessible prose, Bennett's book proves anyone can grasp the basics of Einstein's ideas. His intuitive, nonmathematical approach gives a wide audience its first real taste of how relativity works and why it is so important to science and the way we view ourselves as human beings. “Well-written and uniquely readable . . . Bennett carefully avoids bombastic statements and “spectacularization” of the subject.” —Alberto Nicolis, Columbia University “I have read lots of introductions to relativity, but none is as clear and compelling as this one.” —Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer, SETI Institute