Scott Duke Kominers, Columnist

Kominers’s Conundrums: The Corner-Cutting Chessboard

The pure joy of brainteasers sometimes requires a bit more than trial and error.

April 11, 2020 at 12:00 PM UTC

Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard University department of economics.

The board itself is the challenge in this game.
Photographer: EyeEm/Getty Images

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Last week, we solved a puzzle of light switches – all it took was a short trip to a different part of our brains.1 This week, we’ll be interrogating another common household object: the chessboard.

My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Noah Smith recently reminded me of the following problem first posed by Max Black, a British-American philosopher: