In general, a logic puzzle involves the description of an event or contest. It is derived from the mathematical field of deduction: Clues are provided and the puzzle player has to piece together what actually happened by using clear and logical thinking (thus the name).

One of the most famous logic puzzle pioneers was writer, photographer, mathematician, and illustrator Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898), otherwise known as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll. In his book The Game of Symbolic Logic he introduced several games, asking the reader to solve a puzzle, such as: “some games are fun,” “every puzzle is a game,” thus, “are all puzzles fun?” Puzzles such as this are known as syllogisms, in which the reader is given a list of premises and asked what can be deduced from the list. (For more information about syllogisms, see “Foundations of Mathematics.”)