Cutting the Knot: Difference between revisions

* In [[How Kazir Won His Wife]], Kazir wants to marry the daughter of a king. The king, with one always-truthful daughter and one always lying daughter [[Only Smart People May Pass|sets him a series of]] [[Knights and Knaves]] puzzles, ending with an impossible one: he must determine both the name and the marital status of one of the king's daughters, whose honesty he does not know, with a single yes/no question. {{spoiler|one of the king's daughters elopes with Kazir}}

* ''[[Myst]]: The Book of Atrus'' has Atrus and his father Gehn exploring the ruins of D'ni, searching for blank books. While scavenging, Atrus happens upon a door locked by a puzzle that could have come straight from the video games, and happily settles down to think his way through it... only to be disappointed when Gehn simply smashes the door apart, nicely foreshadowing the latter's approach to problem-solving.

* [[Robert Heinlein|Heinlein]] has a short story, "The Long Watch", wherein a nuclear engineer on the moon locks himself in a bunker (with all the nuclear warheads) to stop a rebelling office from taking control of them. His first thoughts are to defuse the "brain" circuits of each bomb, realizes he doesn't have enough time and ends up... smashing the plutonium with a hammer.

* In ''[[The Princess Bride (novel)|The Princess Bride]]'', Inigo and Fezzik are trying to get through Humperdinck's sinister and booby-trapped Zoo of Death. The first staircase has a mighty snake that Fezzik must overpower. The second staircase is pitch black with poisonous bats, requiring Inigo's superhuman sword skills to detect and skewer. The third and final staircase looks completely ordinary and harmless. Its trap is an extremely poisonous spider that will bite anyone who turns the doorknob. However, by this point, Fezzik is so scared that he rams through the door in a panic, not bothering to turn the knob. Then Inigo casually steps on the spider that emerges from the broken door.