News
Logic Puzzles at BeSt (October 29, 2010)
For the third time the BeSt exhibition informed interested visitors about local and national educational facilities, course offers and universities. In the booth held by the Institute of Computer Science logic puzzles provided by the Computational Logic Group allowed visitors to cast a glance at the fascinating world of logic hidden behind puzzle games.
Members of the institute took turns to answer questions by school classes, pupils and parents interested in possible future studies. Besides obtaining handouts and information material about the courses, prospective students could also get a first hands-on experience with logic used in applications of computer science.
Japanese games puzzles provided by the Computational Logic Group allowed vistors to have a go at logic in a playful manner. Originally invented by the Japanese company Nikoli, these games such as Slitherlink, Masyu and RippleEffect were implemented by Computational Logic students in the course of bachelor projects. Hidden behind the game fun are actually NP-complete problems, and the tools rely on sophisticated logic machinery such as SAT-solvers to generate and solve puzzles. The developed tools thus allow users to generate and solve puzzle instances, but also have a lot of fun playing around, as also visitors of BeSt were soon to find out.
Further contributions of the institute included live-on-stage interviews with computer science students, alumni and scientists to communicate career prospects of computer scientists. Moreover groups of visitors could use their mobile phones to collaboratively complete a jigsaw puzzle, a game developed by the Quality Engineering Group.