Saturday is
Puzzle Exchange Day, so I don’t mind the 7am alarm – true to form Brian is in
the lobby singing Jingle Bells... a quick breakfast and we all head to the
exchange room where everyone’s keen to set up and get swapping – Gill and I lay
out our wares and soon enough we’re off and exchanging.
70-odd exchanges later we’re exhausted – Gill’s done a
brilliant job of keeping me organised and I have a suitcase full of new puzzles
– life is good – and it does feel like Christmas!
Back up to the room for the obligatory loot shot with
puzzles all over the bed before packing most of them into a box and heading
down for the afternoon lectures.
William Waite gave a brilliantly illustrated lecture on
Japanese keychain puzzles – complete with audience participation and knowledge
sharing! Yoshi Kotani showed us how relatively simple it was to solve puzzles
like Instant Insanity using languages like Prolog before Kathleen Malcolmson
delivered a masterclass in producing the perfect dovetails for puzzles. The
final lecture on Imaginary Cubes was really interesting – introducing the
concept of an imaginary cube as a convex solid with three orthogonal
projections that are squares before playing around with them and showing how
some of them make an interesting puzzle… with the promise that they would be
for sale the next day!
At the banquet that evening we shared a table with the
Rothsteins and the Pawligers. The food was great, unfortunately the gannets got
there before us and there was no dessert by the time we went looking for some –
hey ho!
Our entertainment for the evening had had to be rescheduled
so we held a puzzle solving contest…
The first round was an exhibition Sudoku solve featuring Wei
Hwa, Lixy and Taro Arimatsu – with Taro winning reasonably comfortably while
Nick commentated, and fed Lixy the occasional peek at the solutions – although
that seemed to back-fire once or twice. 
From there we progressed to an eight-person elimination
solving contest, that I failed miserably to keep myself out of! We started
fairly benignly with a 3*3*3 cube assembly, but I really made a meal out of it
– at one point I even tried swapping some pieces with the solver next me in the
hope that that would make for an easier puzzle… it didn’t! But it did raise a
few laughs… when I eventually managed to solve my first puzzle and move on to
the next one, several people were already onto the final disentanglement round.
The tray-packing puzzle went a bit better and I didn’t end up spend an embarrassingly
long time on that one… so I managed to at least make it onto my final puzzle
before we had two winners form our round of four… and I have to say that I was
in no way ashamed to have come third to Wei Hwa and Markus! 
Another elimination round produced the four finalists who
were given a suitably more challenging series of puzzles to solve… culminating
in the first two to reach the last puzzle being given a pair of monstrous
Chinese Rings puzzle – the sort that will literally take you years to negotiate
– in spite of that both of them laid into them with relish! When the others had
almost caught up, the first two (Wei Hwa and Markus) were then given a more
reasonable disentanglement to attack, with Markus triumphing over Wei Hwa in
the end.
It was great fun and all of us “volunteers” were given a
prize – so I ended up with a sweet little Puzzlemaster branded version of
Cast Dolce.
…more puzzling in the Design Competition room ensued after
the banquet wound up.
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