Out of over a trillion pages in Google’s index, you had to end up here. Our apologies. Odds are that with that many web pages in existence, a huge number of them will be a banal waste of your time. And that, in fact, is the objective of our Monday Demotivators. This week we’re going to explore simplicity and triviality, which is what you’re probably engaged in if you’re at work right now anyway. The difference is, we don’t pay you! But we’re wasting time. Let’s get rolling. On wasting more of it. The “Eight Queens Puzzle” is a classic example of a “simple but non-trivial” problem. Try arranging 8 queens on a chessboard in such a way that no two queens would be able to attack each other. There are 4,426,165,368 possible arrangements of eight queens on the board, but only 92 solutions. The image at left gets you 3/8 of the way there. Good luck. 3D Logic, a cube-based color pattern puzzle also appears rather simple at first. Things get a little hairy at level 6. Let us know if you get to the level where it tranforms into a 4-dimensional hypercube. We don’t know that it actually does that, but it sounds cool, doesn’t it? If you like your non-trivial simplicity in the form of word puzzles, try this: “A young woman goes to the funeral of her mother. There she meets a man whom she has never met before. She identifies him as the man of her dreams and immediately falls in love. Two days later she kills her sister. Why?” (We’ll post the answer in the comments if anyone asks.) And lastly, if you prefer trivial simplicity, we have some stick people for you. Sure, they’re simple. But when given the choice of killing them or saving their lives, do they still seem trivial? You decide. Hope you have a simple, non-trivial Monday!