Raymond M. Smullyan — новинки

In this entertaining and challenging new collection of logic puzzles, Raymond Smullyan—author of What Is the Name of This Book? And The Lady or the Tiger?—continues to delight and astonish us with his gift for making available, in the thoroughly pleasurable form of puzzles, some of the most important mathematical thinking of our time.

In the first part of the book, he transports us once again to that wonderful realm where knights, knaves, twin sisters, quadruplet brothers, gods, demons, and mortals either always tell the truth or always lie, and where truth-seekers are set a variety of fascinating problems. The section culminates in an enchanting and profound metapuzzle (a puzzle about a puzzle), in which Inspector Craig of Scotland Yard gets involved in a search of the Fountain of Youth on the Island of Knights and Knaves.

In the second and larger section, we accompany the Inspector on a summer-long adventure into the field of combinatory logic (a branch of logic that plays an important role in computer science and artificial intelligence). His adventure, which includes enchanted forests, talking birds, bird sociologists, and a classic quest, provides for us along the way the pleasure of solving puzzles of increasing complexity until we reach the Master Forest and—thanks to Gödel’s famous theorem—the final revelation.










To Mock a Mockingbird will delight all puzzle lovers—the curious neophytes as well as the serious students of logic, mathematics, or computer science.

Join Holmes and Watson as they examine interrupted games to deduce prior moves. A series of increasingly complex chess mysteries culminates in a double murder perpetrated by Professor Moriarty. The master sleuth instructs his companion (and us) in the intricacies of retrograde analysis; readers need only a knowledge of how the pieces move.

The dazzlingly clever and always entertaining Raymond Smullyan takes an unorthodox approach to chess puzzles by treating them as mysteries--with Sherlock Holmes as guide and mentor. The key concept is retrograde analysis. Rather than figuring out how to achieve some end from a given arrangement of chess pieces, the game is to examine the board and deduce what has happened in the past: Which side is white? What were the previous moves? Prove that a promotion did or did not occur. Which piece has been replaced by a coin? These are just a few of the challenges Smullyan presents through the eyes of Holmes and Watson. He even manages about as passable an imitation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's style as can be expected from a tongue-in-cheek presentation. To enjoy these problems you need only know how chess pieces move. The first puzzles in the book teach all the concepts you need to know to decipher the later ones; the process prepares you to join Holmes in solving a baffling double murder--they keys to which reside in a series of devilishly clever puzzles. The chess game is afoot, and it's almost too much fun!

More than two hundred new and challenging logic puzzles--the simplest brainteaser to the most complex paradoxes in contemporary mathematical thinking--from our topmost puzzlemaster ("the most entertaining logician who ever lived," Martin Gardner has called him).
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In sum: a devilish magician's cornucopia of puzzles--a delight for every age and level of ability.