Scott Duke Kominers, Columnist

Kominers’s Conundrums: A Pyramid Scheme to Ponder

This word game can’t be solved without an unerring sense for that which doesn’t belong. 

One of the pyramids of Giza, joined by a legendary lover of riddles.

Photographer: Archive Photos/Getty Images

Lock
This article is for subscribers only.

When solving puzzles, we often play the role of a detective. We start with a sequence of clues, and examine them closely to try to fill in what’s missing. That was the trick to last week’s playlist puzzle (see below) and the explicit goal of our numerical sequence and “missing dinner guest” puzzles several weeks ago.

This week, the goal is the opposite: We’re looking for patterns that can tell us what doesn’t belong.