The first time I picked up Lixy Yamada’s 10 K’s exchange puzzle
and actually tried getting anywhere I was sitting in front of the telly. I had
a go at a couple of the constructions and ended up with a few that looked
vaguely like K’s – if you squinted your eyes and used your imagination.
A short while after that I read George’s description of it
and realised that I’d missed something important - all 10 constructions give
you exactly the same K-shape! Having totally missed the point – or come up with
an ingeniously creative solution – I decided I need to have another bash at 10
K’s – so when I recently went around to Nigel’s one evening to play with
puzzles, I took my copy along.
10 K’s has 10 different (very different!) dissections of the
letter “K”, each in a different colour and all the pieces are neatly packed
into a single sheet when not in play, although Lixy has also thoughtfully provided a
set of individual Ziploc bags for each set of pieces.
Back at Nigel’s I picked a benign-looking set of pieces and
set about trying to make a K – and after a short while I realised that I’d
started with the wrong one and tried to find a simpler one … and indeed after a
brief search I’d managed to make a reasonably convincing “K” from the pieces …
and then applying George’s rather handy strategy of building the next one on
top of the first one, worked out where some of the pieces had to go, and where
the others were likely to go…
The 10 different dissections really are different!
I thought
I’d seen a classic “K” dissection before, but I didn’t recognise it among the
set in this puzzle. A number of the dissections have a couple of pieces that
look similar, possibly even identical, and while it might seem to make sense to
use them in similar positions symmetrically, that often isn’t very useful.
Don’t you love it when logic proves useless in a puzzle?! :-)
IPP Dissection
Noji Tsugumitsu is pulling together some research into
letter dissection puzzles and was dishing out a set of three of three
dissections at IPP33 – and he kindly gave me a set of them of while we were
visiting Kanazawa on our post-IPP trip.
There are two different P-dissections which are reasonably
confusing, but the I-dissection is positively devious, taking me several times
the total time expended on the two P’s.
Noji is quite keen to hear from anyone who has any interesting
or unusual letter dissections, so please let me know if you have any and I’ll
put you in touch with him … he had a
pretty large collection in a flipfile that he was showing around at IPP33 and
he intends to publish them in some form in the future.
E&H
Emrehan Halici’s exchange puzzle consists of a set of
L-shaped pieces of different widths and lengths which you are asked to
construct an “E” and an “H” from. The L’s are laser-cut acrylic pieces and come
in 3 identical pairs … which might strike you as helpful, and indeed it may be
helpful, however when you start trying to build the two target letters, you’ll
probably find that you don’t really want a pair of everything – I kept finding
a perfectly acceptable looking answer (from my perspective at any rate) only to
have a piece left over…
The two constructions required are really different, so
solving one of them gives you absolutely no clues on solving the other … a pair
of neat little challenges that use the same set of pieces – clever!
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