Decades ago, printed magazines used to have pastime sections where you could find this kind of game:
You had a grid (many times a 4x4 grid) with data to fill in. Each row was a category (for exemple row 1 was the name of a person, row 2 was a vehicle, row 3 could be the color of his clothes and row 4 what he/she eat for breakfast).
Then you were given a set of assertions or sentences and you had to "deduct" the full grid from those assertions.
Sample assertions could be:
- The one that went by car, was not wearing blue.
- Both John and Peter ate some sort of cake for breakfast.
- Alice did not eat chocolate cake in the morning.
- Alice and John went in a vehicle of more than 4 wheels.
and so on and so forth.
I wonder if this kind of game/puzzle class or type has a "name" and if there's documentation about it's mathematical model.
The reason behind is that I want to create a series of those for kids to help them develop their reasoning, but instead of thinking each one "from scratch" and then "testing each one" from scratch I was wondering if I could "map" the logics of it to some sort of mathematical graph and then to make the puzzles, "build the solving-graphs" first and afterwards "map-back" the graph to any random history expressed in words.
The model does not need to be a graph. It can be any "mathematical object" and then just use "configurations of that object" to create a virtually infinite number of puzzles for the kids.
As long as the words reflect the logics in the mathematical object behind, the puzzle would be solvable.
Question
I wonder if this particular type of game (from a set of language-expressed premises about a finite set of elements, fill the grid with tabulated data) has any particular name in game theory.