Logic Puzzles: The Roots of My Interests

I stared blankly at this riddle. I parsed the lines again and again, searching for a subtle clue. Unable to find something, I took a deep breath. My eyes drifted from one word to another, heavy with defeat. Upon the eighth word, however, they stopped—”single” … as in a bachelor, I thought. I grinned. Logic puzzles have been a channel for my creativity.

To me, navigating through their twists and turns make them all the more thrilling to solve. Through logical reasoning, I not only have been able to come up with solutions to different challenges but also have been able to extend these patterns to aspects of my own life.

Take the time my family found small water spots within our attic. To better understand if these spots were signs of water leakage from old or damaged roof shingles, we needed to have a bird’s-eye view of our roof. Using a small old remote-controlled helicopter toy, an Arduino (a microcontroller platform that controls specialized pieces of hardware using code), a tiny camera module, a power module, and a storage module, I built a makeshift drone for practically free. Coming up with the idea was the easy part; executing it, though, proved to be the real challenge. I started by building a functional video component on the original Arduino board. Then, incrementally, I tried to enable video recording with the camera and storage module. Lastly, I tried attaching all the modules to the toy helicopter in a way that would still enable the helicopter to achieve liftoff with the additional weight. By breaking down this task into smaller and more manageable pieces, I learned it makes the entire building process significantly easier. Ultimately, this new gadget let me see my roof, record the entire flight, and examine the recorded footage at various magnification settings. We found there to be no distinctly misplaced or damaged shingle, but it did give me the chance to play with some new Arduino components.

As I trudge forward in life, difficult challenges or riddles don’t discourage me from leaving my mark—not even the married couples who survived the plane crash.