What makes a good Logic problem

I am excited that the community is so eager to submit logic problems. Having seen the submissions over the past week, we have developed some guidelines.

Good problems can be characterized in one of the following ways:
1. Actually involve logic, instead of some convoluted thinking - Hotel payment, Relative height, Octopus legs
2. Others will be excited to solve, instead of feeling exasperated by the solution - Car parking, Friends in a circle
3. Correspond to a skill in the Logic Map - Logic Word Problems, Truthtellers and Liars, Information Compression

Here are some categories of questions that should be avoided

Rejected problems:
1. Obvious / pointless / trivial questions - What weights more, Twins, Bury survivors, lions not eaten for two years
2. Highly contextual, possibility for numerous interpretations - example, most pattern recognition problems and another, Organizing days
3. Troll problems - Troll King, Number of things headed to temple, Multiply by 0
4. Problems that belong in a different topic, esp if they involve significant technical knowledge - Number Theory, Combinatorics, Algebra, Geometry, Mechanics
5. English word problems - Anagrams, Riddles
6. Problems that are posted repeatedly- Self descriptive number, Einstein's house puzzle
7. Long winded problems that say a whole bunch of stuff in a whole bunch of words without really meaning anything like this very sentence that you are reading which is so pointless

We have moved most of the rejected problems out of the logic topic, so as to provide a positive example of the kinds of Logic problems on Brilliant. Please take a look at Logic Community Feed for more good examples.

For more guidelines on what makes a good problem in general, see How to get your problem Liked on Brilliant.

#Logic

Note by Calvin Lin
6 years, 1 month ago

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Comments

I'm kind of excited to post my riddles on here; when will the Brilliant team make a section for that so that it can be separate from Logic?

Gavin LO - 6 years, 1 month ago

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We currently do not have plans to release a "riddle topic" in the near term.

You can post those problems, just without a topic. If we see that there is significant interest in them, we will look into developing out the relevant sections.

Calvin Lin Staff - 6 years ago

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Okay.

Gavin LO - 6 years ago

Currently, there are not many level 3, 4 or 5 logic problems. It makes it hard for me to level up.

Ashwin Padaki - 6 years ago

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Do not worry about it.

Contribute some problems if you can.

Logic is interesting

Ronaldo Thomas - 5 years, 11 months ago
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