The Lone Detective - logical reasoning | free online detective game
Logical reasoning game
The Lone Detective is an online puzzle game based around solving criminal cases, but in each one of them you will have to use logical reasoning to fully solve the case. Even if you find all the clues, you need to put together a coherent story to explain them all, which is the ultimate goal of the game.
What is logical reasoning?
Logical reasoning is a method of drawing conclusions from the information you have. It means looking at facts, clues, and statements put in front of you, and deciding which fit a logical pattern or theory. Instead of guessing, you follow a chain of cause and effect, checking whether each step makes sense.
Or to put it simply, in The Lone Detective you won't find the smoking gun, the letter in which the killer admits to what he did, you won't just find the fingerprints and thus solve the case, there is always a piece missing, and you have to use logical reasoning to fill that gap.
Examples of logical reasoning
You return home and find your favourite shoes chewed up with clear teeth marks on them while your dog sits in the corner of a completely different room. Those two facts are not a proof that your dog made a toy out of your shoes, but through logical reasoning you can assume it is his good deed for the day. Unless you have monitoring and camera was pointing at your shoes, you cannot prove that he is guilty, but if you take under consideration that your closed the door when you left your house, there are no open windows or other points of entry and the dog was alone... He had the opportunity (he was left alone and unattended), he had the means (the teeth) and, unless he is a super good boy, the motive (boredom).
Of course, you can also draw a different conclusion, f.e. someone broke into your house, chewed the shoes out of spite, left unspotted by the dog and closed the doors behind him, but let's call it a far-fetched theory. On the other hand, it might have been a conspiracy and your own dog was part of it.
In this example there are 3 different theories of what happened and using logical reasoning you can basically reduce it to the one that is the most likely. The second theory: if someone broke in, there would be some signs of it, and it is hard to imagine the person would close the doors behind him. The third theory: even if your dog would plot against you, he had no keys to let someone in or means to open the doors or windows, not to mention closing them back. Which leaves you with the most likely scenario.
Is logical reasoning and deduction the same thing?
It depends on what you mean by "deduction". Logical reasoning is a broad term for all processes that lead you to reach conclusion from available data, deduction can be one of the methods used to reach that goal (others being abduction and induction). But if you mean "deduction" like in the Sherlock Holmes novels, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle basically meant the process of abduction, which is again one of the methods used in logical reasoning.
What is abduction?
Abduction (or what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called deduction) is a method of choosing the most probable explanation out of given theories (which we shown above in the example). Or to put it in a different way, it is taking an educated guess based on the experience or knowledge that you have. Or, as you might heard it before, if you exclude all other theories, the one you find most probable, must be the correct one. But it doesn't have to be.
Example: in the morning the street is wet, so either it rained during the night or the water truck drove there in the middle of the night. Since street maintenance services usually don't work at nights, therefore it must have been raining.
What is deduction?
Deduction is based on certainty rather than speculation (which is why Sherlock Holmes novels often used the term incorrectly). If you you have certainty regarding the data in hand, the conclusion must be true, even if it does not sound probable.
Example: in the morning the street is wet, so either it rained during the night or the water truck drove there in the middle of the night. Street maintenance services usually don't work at nights and they only sprinkle the street, while the rain falls on everything, since the sidewalk is dry, it must have been the truck.
What is induction?
Induction is building a general conclusion from small sample, which means that if you observe something to be true, through induction you can translate this into a bigger conclusion. Of course, the conclusion could be completely wrong, but you build it based on the data you have.
Example: in the morning the street is wet, yesterday evening there were dark clouds, so it must have rained during the night. The same thing happened last week, therefore when there are dark clouds in the evening, it always rains during the night.
Which method should I use?
It's a simple question, but the answer is not that simple - you should use the method that works for you best. That's why we suggest using logical reasoning in The Lone Detective, because each of those methods have their flaws and each case is slightly different.
