Play for Science

Playing games and puzzles is a great way to sharpen your problem-solving skills.

When the puzzle is solved, each side of a Rubik's Cube contains squares, or facelets, of just one color.

TheCoffee/Wikipedia

A mixed-up Rubik's Cube can take many hours to solve, unless you have the brain of a supercomputer!

At the beginning of a game of checkers, each player lines up his or her pieces on one side of the board. Players take turns moving a single piece one diagonal space at a time. (This is a special board with 100 squares and 4 rows of pieces per team instead of the usual 64 squares and 3 rows.)

Michel32Nl/Wikipdia

A game of checkers gets more complicated with each move.

PartsnPieces/Wikipedia

It took computers 18 years to come up with a solution for the game of checkers. Chess, shown here, is an even more complicated game.