The Portia Puzzles

A collection of simple logic puzzles.

Tags: portia, puzzle, portraits

Summary

When I was growing up, one of my favourite books was a fun text book that was given to me in a math class. It’s filled with funny commentary, drawings, stories, and it has an entire chapter devoted to puzzles. Among all of them, perhaps the ones I liked the most were the “Portia” puzzles, which consist of finding out the location of some hidden portraits, using logical reasoning.

I wanted to experiment a little with a program that had some sort of narrative, and I thought that translating something like those Portia puzzles could work well, so here’s the result.

I hope you find them fun.

Credits

• The concept of the Portia Puzzles is based on chapter 5.2. of the book “MateBásica Mática” by Pedro Gómez. http://ued.uniandes.edu.co/ued/servidor/ued/libros/matebasica.html

• Artwork for the portrait frame, by meticulous, released into the public domain. http://openclipart.org/detail/118087/artistic-frames-2-by-meticulous

• Dagger artwork by hatalar205, released into the public domain. http://openclipart.org/detail/170455/circassian-dagger-by-hatalar205-170455

• Chests artwork based on the work by hc, released under the CC-BY 3.0 license, which in turn is based on the artwork of Daniel Cook. http://opengameart.org/content/jrpg-chests-16-32-64-and-128px-squared

• Treasure chest image used in the intro, by inky2010, released into the public domain. http://openclipart.org/detail/76483/treasure-chest-by-inky2010

• Town background image, based on “The Charm of Oxford”, by litfarn, released under the public domain. http://openclipart.org/detail/2944/the-charm-of-oxford-by-liftarn

• Background image for the main room, by Midnight68, released into the public domain. http://opengameart.org/content/interior01

• Portraits of women were taken from paintings by John William Godward. Pictures in the public domain, released by Wikimedia Commons. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/John_William_Godward

• Abstract backgrounds are from the “Graphic” collection, at Creativity103.com, released under the CC-BY 3.0 license. http://creativity103.com/collections/Graphic/index.html

• Fonts supplied by Google Web Fonts. http://www.google.com/fonts/

Links

• This program on Khan Academy
• This program on GitHub
• The Media Assets Manager library (MAM)

ChangeLog

Current revision: rev2

2013-06-09

    * Fixed gray background on the images of portraits and
      the dagger, when fading in and out.
    * Updated MAM to version pre4, which may solve a major
      bug in browsers like Safari.

2013-06-04

    * First version of this program.

To Do