In the run up to MPP11 Wil had mentioned that he was hoping
to have a new cola bottle puzzle for us in the Midlands. Having seen a crate
full of rather special aluminium cola bottles in his kitchen a couple of months
ago I was hoping that this one would be
something a little different, and Wil didn’t disappoint!
Shortly after settling down at my place on the Friday
evening, Wil opened his suitcase and produced a very funky looking aluminium
cola bottle with a familiar-looking red rod sticking out of the mouth. He said
he’d been working on it right up until the night before and had managed to
bring just a couple of them along. He explained that these cola bottles were a
bit different and since they were made of aluminium, it was a bit harder than
usual to see what was going on inside. Strijbos – master of the understatement!
He had however solved that particular problem, he went on to
explain, by pointing to the 4mm hole he’d drilled in the side of the bottle as
he produced a little glow stick and proceeded to bend it and set it glowing.
One end of the glow stick is poked into the hole in the side while you peer
into the mouth of the bottle and you can almost see something useful inside
there … then he points out that these glow sticks only have a limited life and
that with the pair of them he’s given you … one of which he’s helpfully lit up
already – you only have about 24 hours to solve the puzzle!
Gotcha!
Better get started then…
I peer into the green gloom and once you get used to it, you
can see a fair amount inside there… only problem is that part of Wil’s
mechanism appears to be a plastic washer on the familiar red rod whose only
purpose seems to be to hide the business end of the stick from view …
unfortunately it’s pretty effective at exactly that!
Down in the bottom of the bottle the familiar jangle of a
grey marble provides some familiarity, but not a lot of help ... a fair amount
of experimentation and manoeuvring reveals not an awful lot to me so I hand it
over to Louis and he jangles things about for a while - noticing more than I've
managed to, but not managing to make significant progress before we retire for
the night, leaving the little green light glowing in the dark while we recharge
for a full day's puzzling.
The bottle goes along to MPP11 ... along with two other
copies but it takes all day of various folks making various attempts before
Russ manages to open one of them... much to Wil's delight. Seeing the business
end of it out in the open helps you realise just how mean Wil's been... working
out what's going on in there through a tiny hole in a dark bottle takes a fair
amount of imagination - kudos Russ!
Wil talks me through some of the aspects of the design, and
shows me how to make it even harder with a simple twist ... he's mean!
And by the way, reassembly for the next victim is
non-trivial too...
The bottle gets reassembled and I get some time to experiment
and play some more the next evening and even having seen the mechanism outside
the bottle and knowing how it must work, it takes me a little while to come up
with a reasonable strategy for reliably opening it ...
I own this puzzle also. Can you tell me what this "twist" is that Wil showed you, on how to make it more difficult?? You've gotten me very curious...
ReplyDeleteWhoah - that's going back a bit and my addeld brain is struggling to dredge up the tidbit - I THINK it had something to do with flipping a part around, but without playing with it, I can't remember... experiment! :-)
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