Encyclopedia > Transport puzzle

  Article Content

Transport puzzle

Transport puzzles are logistical puzzles, hence are puzzles which represent real-life transport problems.
Like in shuffling puzzles, no piece is ever lost or added to the board. In contrast to shuffling puzzles, however, in transport puzzles all tokens have to follow certain routes given on the board; they cannot be lifted off the board and placed on faraway positions that have no visible connection to the from-position.
Hence transport puzzles often mean that the player has to move (physical) objects in a very restricted space.

This puzzle class has several subclasses:

A well known example: A farmer has a boat, a cabbage, a goat and a wolf. He has to cross the river with his boat. His boat is small, so he can take either the cabbage, the goat or the wolf with him - but not two of them at the same time. If he leaves the goat with the cabbage unattended, the goat will eat it. Likewise, he cannot leave the goat with the wolf alone.
How many crossings must the farmer make?

Warning: Wikipedia contains spoilers!

Clearly the farmer first can take the goat only. After subsequently bringing one of the other two, say the cabbage, the clue is to take the goat temporarily back. He then brings the wolf and finally the goat again. Thus there are seven crossings, four forward and three back.

The famous British puzzler Henry Dudeney[?] added several puzzles to this category.



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
Islip Terrace, New York

... the town the population is spread out with 29.5% under the age of 18, 6.7% from 18 to 24, 33.6% from 25 to 44, 20.6% from 45 to 64, and 9.6% who are 65 years of age or ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 21.9 ms