Fifteen puzzle
The peak of the popularity of tags fell on the last decades of the nineteenth century. Children and adults loved this game, boxes with square knuckles were in every home. Then came the period of half-oblivion, the tag modestly gave way to computer games. Online tagging has given the old game a new lease on life.
History of the game
The tag has an author, not many games can boast of this. Two people, Samuel Loyd and Noyes Palmer Chapman, claimed copyright. The game appeared at the beginning of 1880 in the USA, it was written about in the newspapers, but the name of Loyd was never mentioned. On this basis, tag historians have concluded that postmaster Noah Chapman was the creator of the puzzle. An argument in his favor - in 1874, Chapman offered his friends a puzzle in which they had to put sixteen squares with numbers in rows so that the sum in each was 34.
The postmaster's son brought the puzzle to Anna and James Belden, they made several copies. One copy somehow got to a school for the hearing impaired, where they started handicraft production, and already in 1879, boxes with knuckles were traded in Boston. In the same year, artist Matthias J. Rice began producing The Gem Puzzle.
The puzzle game became even more popular when a dentist offered a prize for solving it. In 1880, future tags had already conquered Europe, Russia, Australia and New Zealand, but for some reason Chapman was denied a patent. In the United States, the hobby "15" was compared to madness, poems and poems were written about the game, articles and studies were written.
Interesting facts
- In a puzzle made by Mathias Rice (1879), tiles with numbers had to be added in random order and then moved in ascending order. In another version, all the tiles were in order, it was only necessary to swap the tiles with the numbers "14" and "15". This turned out to be the most difficult - it was possible to solve the problem only in half of the cases.
- Modern tags are more diverse than their ancestors. In addition to the classic options with numbers, there are puzzles in which you need to restore pictures or add words.
- The most difficult version of the tag is the magic square, in which you have to line up rows of numbers with the same amount.
Fifteen is not as simple as it might seem. You will understand this when you try to solve the puzzle. Test your intelligence with online taggers!
