George Bell has a knack for designing mean puzzles that mess
with my head – admittedly I’m setting a low bar here – but I suspect that his
love of playing with spheres and truncated octahedra manage to confuse some
others as well.
My latest puzzle from George’s Etsy shop was Triple Chocolate Box – his entry in the 2020 Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design competition.
This puzzle makes great use of George’s new 3D printer to produce the three black
and white boxes adorned with your favourite brands of chocolate. Your task is
to pack the 24 little (slightly wooden) chocolates into each of the three boxes
in turn, so that their lids are fully closed. Of course George has helpfully
joined those 24 little balls into six sets of differently shaped pieces, just so
you aren’t bored to death by a trivial packing task.
Clearly the boxes presented provide a basic round, triangular
and square shape for the packing, but the boxes are
all slightly different heights… which is interesting.
When the puzzle arrived, the pieces were all snugly inside
the Lindt box, and George’s helpful note suggested tipping the pieces out blindly
before playing – and that’s great advice, but let me assure you, gentle
puzzler, that even if you catch a view of the pieces as they come tumbling out,
it will help you not a jot, because they do tumble rather chaotically and then
lie there on your desk mocking you, of perhaps that was just me.
I started off with the round box and it took quite a while
of fiddling and experimenting for me find some almost-solutions – and then some
more experimentation to find an actual solution – and by now I’d found that I’d
started getting the hang of how the different shapes interacted among layers of
the packing and I actually felt like I was beginning to understand things with
the first one solved…
…which is probably exactly what George was hoping, because
when I moved on to the triangular box, I found that most of what I thought I
knew, was pretty useless. Try as I might to get things to work in the second
box, they wouldn’t… until I literally went right back to basics – and that really
helped. So I built up a while new model of “how things worked” and managed to squeeze
them all into the second box.
At this point I’m probably feeling a little smug and I dive
into our old friend the Lindt box… after all, I’ve got two different packing
schemas available to me so it’s just a case of finding the best one for the job
and bashing through it…
Of course George strikes again – and soon enough you realise
that neither of those is any use at all… so you head back to the drawing board
yet again… the final box is pretty mean and the first two do a great job of
gently leading you up the garden path before the third one positively crushes
you. You’ll need what you learned on the first two, but you’ll need to find an
altogether different approach, yet again.
It does provide an excellent sense of satisfaction when you
finally find The Third Way and you can drop that final little piece neatly into
place… what I love most about this puzzle is the fact that George’s three boxes
force you into totally different ways of packing those little spheres together –
each of them seemingly pretty compact, and all of them recycling the same set
of pieces.
It’s a great set of packing puzzles.
