DroidQuest, Gate and Logicly are modern logic puzzle games based on the classic educational games Rocky's Boots (1982) and Robot Odyssey (1984). [more inside]
posted by speicus on Nov 2, 2009 - 22 comments

Games, Actions and Social Software. As seen through the lens of mathematics and logic. Presented as a discussion between characters. [more inside]
posted by jouke on Sep 27, 2009 - 3 comments

A nearly impossible logic puzzle. Other mindtwisting puzzles. More puzzles of varying difficulty (don't scroll down too far!). XKCD's take. (previously epic post Also: 1, 2)
posted by desjardins on Jul 30, 2009 - 47 comments

Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid has been recorded as a series of video lectures for MIT's Open Courseware project.
posted by loquacious on May 30, 2009 - 74 comments

Apparently there's at least a 51% chance of God's existence. It starts out 50/50, like with pets. You have, say, either a dog or a cat. It's a 50/50 chance that it's one or the other, just like it's 50/50 that there's a God or not. Well, we exist. You exist. The earth exists. That nudges it up to 51%. If I understand this youtube gentleman. Hilarious exercise in smug delivery of ironclad logic.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders on Apr 2, 2009 - 126 comments

Friday Flash Fun*: Конструктор: Engineer of the People, in which you are an engineer working in a top-secret semiconductor facility called H3, designing top-secret integrated circuits based on specifications provided to you. *For certain values of 'fun'
posted by daniel_charms on Mar 27, 2009 - 36 comments

Five ways 'common sense' lies to you - a description of some everyday logical fallacies and how they effect us in a larger scale.
posted by flatluigi on Mar 18, 2009 - 70 comments

Metafilter's Back Monday Flash Fun: Two Rooms is a logic game where you trigger switches to move barriers out of your way. [more inside]
posted by schyler523 on Jan 26, 2009 - 9 comments

In a breathless, passionate, yet level-headed 15 part series, YouTube user, paleontologist, ex-Christian, and potential Space Coyote impersonator AronRa presents an uncommonly well-written and presented argument against what he identifies as the 14 "Fundamental Falsehoods of Creationism." [more inside]
posted by Mr. Anthropomorphism on Jan 13, 2009 - 57 comments

Consider the Philosopher. The early metaphysical investigations of David Foster Wallace.
posted by homunculus on Dec 14, 2008 - 83 comments

The Mathemagician and Pied Puzzler (PDF, rough table of contents here) is a collection of puzzles created by members of the Gathering 4 Gardner Foundation, in tribute to the man himself (previously). Also freely available at the G4G site is Puzzle Craft (PDF), by Stewart Coffin. (The Puzzling World of Polyhedral Dissections, also by Coffin, is available here.)
posted by cog_nate on Oct 1, 2008 - 9 comments

Some are calling it the "Kindle Killer". (Demo launch video at engadget.) Plastic Logic's new e-reader, expected to be out in the first half of 2009, does promise to offer a lot that Kindle and most other other popular e-readers don't, like a larger display, big enough to provide a newspaper or magazine layout; touch-based markup and annotation; the ability to read standard documents and other file types without conversion; (promised) Wi-Fi connectivity (including the ability to transfer documents between readers); and last but not least, a screen display that you can hit with a shoe, and isn't that something we've all been waiting for during these tense times? [more inside]
posted by taz on Sep 13, 2008 - 85 comments

Neil Fraser builds logic gates out of dominoes. (See also this half-adder.) Via Mathpuzzle.
posted by Upton O'Good on Sep 1, 2008 - 18 comments

The Fallacy of Examples, and the problems of extrapolating from media. [Via RConversation]
posted by homunculus on Jul 7, 2008 - 5 comments

Mnemonic Arts of Blessed Raymond LULL
posted by generalist on Apr 7, 2008 - 19 comments

Inspired by this earlier post, I thought it was time to formally introduce people to Rocky's Boots. [more inside]
posted by wanderingmind on Mar 28, 2008 - 12 comments

This is a cool game you can download. Here are some rule books for it. [more inside]
posted by orthogonality on Mar 28, 2008 - 22 comments

A mindbending logic puzzle. A thousand people on the island, 900 brown-eyed and 100 blue-eyed; anyone who learns their own eye color must kill themself the next day; a visitor mentions that there is a blue-eyed person on the island; what happens? Nothing, you say, because they already know that? Wrong. Further details at the Terry Tao post linked above, but don't scroll down below the boxed description unless you want hints and/or spoilers. [more inside]
posted by languagehat on Feb 15, 2008 - 390 comments

Parmenides. "The pre-Socratic philosopher sparked an intellectual revolution that still echoes today. Yet for philosophy and science to continue to progress in the 21st century, we may need to embark on an entirely new cognitive journey ."
posted by homunculus on Dec 27, 2007 - 21 comments

A virtually unlimited supply of randomly-generated logic puzzles, in a variety of sizes and difficulties: Nonograms. Slither Link. Nurikabe. Bridges. Light Up.
posted by Upton O'Good on Nov 28, 2007 - 18 comments

Let’s Do Lunch. (Previously and previously.)
posted by Soup on Nov 22, 2007 - 26 comments

Use everyone's logic and vocabulary skills to figure out what the secret word is.
posted by Blazecock Pileon on Jul 20, 2007 - 27 comments

According to this guy, you’re not ultimately morally responsible for choosing whether to snark or not to snark in response to this FPP. A discussion of the philosophical problems surrounding freewill from British Analytic philosopher Galen Strawson. (Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s throw in this unrelated review of Strawson’s latest work on consciousness, just for an extra splash of color.)
posted by saulgoodman on May 23, 2007 - 115 comments

A graphical dissertation of Mims' "This Is Why I'm Hot". Consider the reasoning, first, of just "I'm hot 'cause I'm fly": Mims is hot because he's fly. But it raises the question: Does being hot guarantee one's being fly? "You ain't 'cause you not" would seem to clear that up: It would appear that fly and hot are interchangable. If you are one, you are both; if you aren't at least one, you are neither.
posted by four panels on Apr 23, 2007 - 33 comments

The Einstein Puzzle by Flowix Games is based on an old DOS game called Sherlock, which, in turn, was based on Einstein's (Supposed) Puzzle (Previously). No, it's not Friday yet, and no, it's not Flash. It's a really logical game, and it's really damn hard. I've only won once, and that was within the first few times of playing. If you find it hard to figure out what's going on, read THIS... It helped me to figure out EXACTLY what the hell was going on. The authors are Russian, and the help in the game may only serve to confuse you. ;) It's free, and runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. I'm hooked on it, Dammit. :D
posted by Vamier on Mar 22, 2007 - 32 comments

Geek Logik is Garth Sundem's book & blog about equations for every day living, including how many cups of coffee you require to be functional, who to vote for, and others.
posted by xmutex on Nov 7, 2006 - 9 comments

Labor Intensive is a new online puzzle extravaganza in the style of the MIT Mystery Hunt and the aforelinked Puzzle Boat. Appease the Gods by performing twelve puzzly labors. Good luck!
posted by painquale on Sep 22, 2006 - 3 comments

3D Logic Connect the colors on the cube
posted by Bezbozhnik on Jun 2, 2006 - 37 comments

"In 1953, while working a hotel switchboard, a college graduate named Shea Zellweger began a journey of wonder and obsession that would eventually lead to the invention of a radically new notation for logic. From a basement in Ohio, guided literally by his dreams and his innate love of pattern, Zellweger developed an extraordinary visual system - called the “Logic Alphabet” - in which a group of specially designed letter-shapes can be manipulated like puzzles to reveal the geometrical patterns underpinning logic."
posted by vacapinta on Apr 17, 2006 - 30 comments

Douglas Hofstadter says, "What troubles me is the notion that things that touch me at my deepest core -- pieces of music most of all, which I have always taken as direct soul-to-soul messages -- might be effectively produced by mechanisms thousands if not millions of times simpler than the intricate biological machinery that gives rise to a human soul.". That was prompted by his reception to the output of David Cope's project Experiments in Musical Intelligence.
posted by Gyan on Apr 11, 2006 - 22 comments

Fallacy Files
posted by Gyan on Feb 11, 2006 - 16 comments

Can God make a rock so heavy that he could not lift it?
posted by brownpau on Jan 13, 2006 - 161 comments

Nothing is funnier than an academic or scientist explaining humor.
posted by Falconetti on Dec 11, 2005 - 10 comments

Who has the fish? Einstein logic puzzle. If I can do it, you guys can.
posted by swift on Aug 4, 2005 - 53 comments

Gödel and the Nature of Mathematical Truth : A Talk with Verena Huber-Dyson
posted by Gyan on Jul 29, 2005 - 77 comments

Godel's theorems have been used to extrapolate a great many "truths" about the world. Torkel Franzen sets the record straight in his new book Godel's Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse. Read the introduction (PDF). If you want, check out his explanation of the theorems.
posted by Gyan on Jun 29, 2005 - 65 comments

The Logic of Diversity "A new book, The Wisdom of Crowds [..:] by The New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki, has recently popularized the idea that groups can, in some ways, be smarter than their members, which is superficially similar to Page's results. While Surowiecki gives many examples of what one might call collective cognition, where groups out-perform isolated individuals, he really has only one explanation for this phenomenon, based on one of his examples: jelly beans [...] averaging together many independent, unbiased guesses gives a result that is probably closer to the truth than any one guess. While true — it's the central limit theorem of statistics — it's far from being the only way in which diversity can be beneficial in problem solving." (Three-Toed Sloth)
posted by kliuless on Jun 20, 2005 - 6 comments

“Gödel put logic on the mathematical map.”
An excellent interview with Rebecca Goldstein, biographer of Kurt Godel
posted by thatwhichfalls on Mar 19, 2005 - 23 comments

There is an island where all the inhabitants are either knights or knaves. Knights always tell the truth, and knaves always lie [PDF]. Can you tell which is which?
posted by skoosh on Mar 15, 2005 - 18 comments

Arghhhhh!!! Aghhhhhhhh! Arghhhhhhh!!!

Cheats for PuzzleDonkey4 Available here
posted by willnot on Dec 1, 2004 - 55 comments

Redskins lose. An interesting example of the logical fallacy known as Coincidental Correlation, for the last 71 years the Washington Redskins' last home game before Election Day has correlated with the success of the incumbent president. Boy, it's a good thing in sports no one believes in silly statistics...
posted by XQUZYPHYR on Oct 31, 2004 - 79 comments

"WARNING!!! The puzzles on this site are very difficult, and most require the use of a good spreadsheet program in order to solve them. It will take many hours, perhaps days, to solve each puzzle..."
posted by limitedpie on Aug 11, 2004 - 7 comments

dogblog, bogblog, fogblog, cogblog, logblog, zogblog, jogblog, yogblog, gogblog, wogblog, nogblog, vogblog, hogblog, smogblog, frogblog.
posted by reklaw on Aug 10, 2004 - 28 comments

Japanese Flash logic test
Get the family from one side of the river, to the other. [more inside]
posted by plemeljr on Apr 8, 2004 - 28 comments

Conversational Terrorism Protect yourself from responding to or using these rhetorical cheats. (via the lovely boingboing)
posted by PinkStainlessTail on Jan 22, 2003 - 31 comments

Chicken or Egg? Well .... neither, apparently.

"One little chap thought that you got orange juice from milk, because the milkman delivered orange juice to his door ".

Anyone else have amusingly misguided, yet (slightly) logical assumptions as a kid?.

posted by MintSauce on May 2, 2002 - 107 comments

"This Index of Logical Fallacies looks like it should be required reading for anyone who wants to participate in online discussions. (Hello, Metafilterians? I'm looking in your direction...)"

This from someone named Meg Hourihan. . .I found the link useful (very) while finding the linker very condescending, in this case. I guess we can consider ourselves slapped, huh?
posted by Danf on May 1, 2002 - 63 comments

"They are, it is true, almost laughably simple by comparison with real people and real societies, but that is exactly the point. If even the crudest toy societies take on a life and a logic of their own, then it must be a safe bet that real societies, too, have their own biographies." Things have certainly gotten more interesting in the years since John Conway invented the game of life.
posted by tdismukes on Apr 2, 2002 - 20 comments

A few logic puzzles by Raymond Smullyan . Professor of mathmatics, logic, and philosophy, lifelong magician and concert caliber piano player. Even the titles of his books are fun. Anyone familiar with him?
posted by Mack Twain on Mar 17, 2002 - 7 comments

But it is at times of bewilderment that the weapon of analysis and criticism comes into its own... If western culture is shown to be rich it is because, even before the Enlightenment, it has tried to "dissolve" harmful simplifications through inquiry and the critical mind. Umberto Eco speaks in The Guardian.
posted by rushmc on Oct 15, 2001 - 11 comments