Riddle of Scheherazade: And Other Amazing Puzzles

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In this devilishly fun new puzzle book, Raymond Smullyan, the grand master of the logic puzzle, lends a helpinghand to Scheherazade from the Arabian Nights.

Fresh from the perils of the original thousand-and-one-nights, she is once again in danger of losing her head at dawn. Thinking quickly, she manages to stay her execution each evening by posing an ingenious brainteaser that keeps the king -- and the reader -- guessing until the next night. In all, The Riddle of Scheherazade includes 225 puzzles, some wonderful old brainteasers, and many wickedly original new ones. There are logic tricks and number games, true/false paradoxes, puzzles about puzzles, and much more, including an excursion into an amusing new field Smullyan calls "coercive logic," in which to answer truthfully the puzzler must actually change his behavior. Enough mind-bending fun for another thousand-and-one-nights.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Raymond Smullyan has a gift for turning the most abstract and arcane topics in mathematics and logic into concrete and charming images. — Douglas R. Hofstadter