Richard Gain’s Superstrings

Richard entered his latest design, Superstrings, in last year’s NobYoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition at IPP31 in Berlin and promptly won a Jury First Prize Award!

After he’d established that none of us at MPP3 were attending IPP31 (none of us move in those lofty circles yet!) he’d teased a couple of folks with a quick shot at one and it seemed to go down pretty well.. I was dashing around keeping people fed and watered so only saw one from a distance that day, and when it duly went and won a First Prize, I knew I’d have to get myself one at some point ... so back in December I got hold of Richard and as luck would have it he had a couple of pre-dyed copies available so I took one off him. 

It arrived in a rather snug clear acrylic box – that I suspect is a golf ball presentation box – but not having seen one of these before, it took me embarrassingly longer than it should have to even open the little box! Having successfully extracted the puzzle, playing commenced...

Superstrings consists of two intertwined pieces that each have four diagonally connected cubies on an open chain – those two bits then interlock so that you end up with a 2*2*2 cube with diagonally matching colours. [If that doesn’t make sense, just look at the pictures – all will become clear!]

Starting out it soon becomes apparent that even though it looks like there’s a huge amount of space in there – those pieces are shaped just the right way to stop you from doing most of the things you’d like to do ... despite that, there is a bit of movement to explore and from the first few moves it looks like this is going to be a nice, well-behaved orthogonal puzzle – a little way in you’ll find the pieces have opened up a bit and given you a bit more room to work with, but there’s no way out – until you notice that in some positions, there’s just enough room to twist one piece past another – UH OH... that’s not a good sign – and then thinking back to the other puzzles that Richard’s designed and produced, it was probably inevitable that there’d be twists and turns involved, wouldn’t there?

 

Right, so having passed that little test, more experimentation and fumbling along will part the two bits... 

But that’s the easy part – putting them back together again is quite a bit harder – you’ll find quite a few dead ends that seem to have been set up especially for the impatient puzzler wanting to get straight to the final position - you’ll realise the importance of starting in the right place (and the right orientation) and taking the whole path to the end ... you’ll notice that the design of the pieces only just stops you from doing quite a few of the things you’d really like to – cracking design, nicely executed in all the right choice of materials – the Shapeways material has enough give so that the pieces aren’t brittle and prone to breaking, but have more than enough rigidity to stop you from doing things Richard would rather you didn’t. 

Another great little pocket puzzle from Richard Gain. 

You can read Brian’s thoughts over here and  Kevin’s thoughts here – they both seemed to like it too! 

Switch Cube

Back in December I acquired a couple more of Richard Gain’s Microcubology puzzles. I’m a lazy sod so I bought them directly from him so that I could get them already coloured – Richard does a great job dying the pieces different colours and only charges a few quid extra for all his hard work. (I keep thinking that one day he’s going to realise that he’s under charging for all his time and he’s going to put the prices up...)

Switch Cube is one of Richard’s own designs and was one of the first puzzles that he made available in a new, slightly larger, cube structure. The individual little cubies making up the pieces are slightly larger than on his earlier puzzles, as are the holes on the faces – and the net result is that he’s managed to produce a larger puzzle without much extra material – which is important because Shapeways, who produce the pieces, charge by the amount of material used in the manufacturing process – so you end up with a larger puzzle for a similar price. Result! 

The larger pieces feel just as sturdy as the previous smaller ones, but they’re definitely easier to handle at this size – and indeed there’s one little move on this one that is infinitely less fiddly at this size. [Richard’s taken this even further now with his “Open” structures that have even larger holes on the faces, reducing the price even further.]

Right, back to the puzzle at hand – Switch Cube is a 5*5*5 interlocking cube, with a twist! 

Yip, Burr Tools won’t help you here – it might show you where the pieces could fit, but it won’t show you how to get them there! :-)

Starting out with the cube, it’s fairly straightforward to find the first couple of moves – a quick inspection of the faces will tell you what might move in which direction and soon enough you’re off and running – only then you hit a brick wall and there’s a sneaky little move – not unrelated to the name of the puzzle, that you need to apply before proceeding. Having done that, the cube continues to expand in all directions until the first couple of pieces come adrift – and from there on out, the rest will come apart fairly simply.

Putting it back together, or indeed starting from a pile of pieces, is a much larger challenge. Sure, there are a couple of fairly large pieces that narrow down your options for you, and then you can probably work out how the other bits need to be positioned in the final solution, but working out how to get them in there is more than a little tricky – remember there were 11 moves (by my count) before the first sub-assemblies came apart ... and there’s that sneaky little one in the middle that you’re apt to forget about.

Not sure if I prefer the larger size in general or not, but on this particular puzzle, the extra size means that normal-sized people can do everything they might need to without resorting to a tool of some sort, or a passing small child – and anyway, people tend to frown on that sort of thing, don’t they?

Oskar’s Maze Medal

As far as I can tell, this puzzle started out life known as 4D, when it was Oskar van Deventer’s self-designed exchange puzzle at IPP23 in Chicago. More recently, since January 2010, a slight variation has been available under the name Medal in Oskar’s Shapeways store. I remember spotting it in the Shapeways store while I was randomly exploring Oskar’s puzzles and thinking that it looked like an interesting puzzle, so I was rather delighted when my latest little order from Wil arrived with Louis when he came across for MPP3, and Wil had include a cast metal version of Oskar’s Maze Medal in lieu of the postage he’d saved by having Louis carry the puzzles across the channel. Everyone’s a winner!!

The puzzle came in a Hanayama-style box, but the colours and branding looked a bit strange and on closer inspection, it bears the logo of the International Maths Olympiad – it seems that Hanayama have manufactured a bunch of these to be used as prizes or gifts for folks competing in the recent annual International Maths Olympiad held in Amsterdam – rather fitting since when assembled they resemble a medal to be hung from a ribbon, and handily they’re gold on one side and silver on t’other.

The puzzle is quite striking with the shiny gold and silver disks on opposite sides sandwiching a pair of black frames that each have a pair of pins to engage the mazes. The aim is to navigate to the end of both mazes in order to release the disks from the frames.

Navigating through the mazes is a combination of rotating the two disks independently to move around on an arc, and sliding the black frames in and out to move between arcs. Your movements are constrained by having to be at the same (in /out) depth front and back on each side (because the two pins on each black frame are opposite one another).

It’s a lovely puzzle to sit and fiddle with – in common with almost all of the Hanayama cast puzzles, it feels solid and really well made and looks quite handsome to boot. All legal moves are smooth and clear and generally if you’re finding that a move won’t work the way you’re expecting, there’s something on the other side blocking you (because the disks spin quite freely, depending on how you choose to hold the puzzle, flipping it over can sometimes nudge a disk and block your move unintentionally).

Fairly soon after I got it I managed to navigate all the way to the ends of the mazes, but couldn’t quite get it to release, so thinking that the two sides must release separately, I wandered off down a rabbit-hole and spent a while trying to navigate to each end of the maze individually… at some point I took a more careful look at the mazes and realised that the only place where you can expand the black frames that final little bit, was at the respective exits, so blitzed through the mazes and positioned both just about at the end and gave the frames a more solid tug than I had last time, and this time they parted, parking the respective mazes in their open position and allowing the puzzle to be dismantled.  

I reckon it’s an intermediate level puzzle that should amuse puzzlers for a little while without scaring off non-puzzlers, who seem to enjoy fiddling around and exploring the mazes… 

In case you’re interested, there seem to be a couple of subtly different brandings of this puzzle around: I’ve spotted that Puzzlemaster has them for sale and that their stock is Puzzlemaster-branded (instead of being IMO-branded), whereas the ones available from Sloyd are branded “Cast Puzzle”.

allard shops at Shapeways...

On my recent little foray into Shapeways-world I also picked up a couple of George Bell’s puzzles (again, it would have been rude not to...). 

Diagonal CubePuzzle: this was Stewart Coffin’s design # 58, first released in 1981. While most copies of this puzzle are made in wood (and cost a lot more than this version), George published this one on Shapeways in October last year and for the princely sum of $26.50 you get a classic little puzzle with a whole lotta pedigree. 

It’s hard enough trying to figure out where to place the dissimilar pieces to create a solid cube, but then you need to work out how to actually assemble them in a co-ordinated motion along the right axis. The pieces are nice and solid and interlock neatly – great little puzzle. 

 

Stan’s Tetrahedron (invented by Leonard Gordon in 1988) is a very interesting assembly of a tetrahedron using two mirrored pairs of identical pieces. The unusual angles used in the pieces, and interesting shapes of the pieces themselves make this an interesting little challenge... with the last piece locking the assembly together rather neatly. 

Octahedron with child consists of 4 pieces – 3 of which are similar and rather unusual in their shape, whilst the fourth is a tetrahedron made of 4 rhombic dodecahedrons that serves as a locking piece to keep the assembly together. While I’m ready to admit that I’m no expert on these sort of puzzles, I find the angles in working with rhombic dodecahedrons rather confusing and more than a little challenging – but finding the right way to get the first three pieces to make the guts of the octahedron ready to accept the child-piece makes for good, rewarding puzzling.

 
Kuball Puzzle was designed by Viktor Genel and modified a little by Tom Lensch, who added the cubes between the balls when he made the puzzle in wood. This is the simplest of the puzzles I got from George’s shop, but again the angles and the interlocking of the pieces makes for a satisfying little puzzle ... very cute. 

allard discovers Shapeways

OK, so in the last post I mentioned that I’d picked up one of Oskar’s new centre-pieces from Shapeways for my Mosaic Cube, and that I’d ordered a couple of other things while I was there ... well, it would have been rude not to, wouldn’t it?

Oskar’s Shapeways shop has an absolute abundance of specialised puzzles for the discerning twisty-guru – right up to a DIY 17 * 17 * 17 twisty cube – if you simply have to have the biggest, badest cube in town!  He also has a number of other puzzles, including a series of Cooksey Mazes that caught my eye. 

The original was designed in the 1970’s as a prototype Pentangle puzzle that didn’t quite get off the ground – Oskar has simplified the design in a reproduction of the original Cooksey Maze and then produced a set of 6 Cooksey Tributes for Shapeways to churn out. 

I picked up a copy of the ‘original’ Cooksey and it’s a neat little puzzle – the ring has two pins that alternately engage opposite sides of the maze on the cylinder. The ring is a bit oversize, so at any time, one pin is engaged in the maze and the other is free allowing the ring to either rotate or slide up and down, depending on the orientation of the hole that the pin’s engaged in. The maze itself is made up of a series of 2*1 or 3*1 rectangles orientated horizontally or vertically and the aim is to work your way from the start of the maze at one end of the cylinder to the other end (and back, since you can only take the ring off on one end).

Working between the two pins you can rotate the ring and move it up and down following the rectangular holes in the cylinder – every now and then you’ll come across a single square hole, which effectively means you’ve hit a dead end and need to retrace your steps a bit.

The framework construction of the cylinder can make for a slightly disorientating experience and the interaction between two sets of opposing holes makes for an interesting puzzle. No doubt if you take the trouble to map out all the possible routes, it collapses into a fairly simple puzzle, but that’s probably true of a lot of puzzles.

While I was nosing around Shapeways, I also spent some time looking through George Bell’s shop – and couldn’t stop myself from picking up a copy of his Five Tetrahedra Plus. It consists of 5 serially interlocking tetrahedra, with an icosahedron trapped in the centre. Each of the interlocking pieces is ‘solid’ in the sense that it consists of a single piece – they’re created interlocked. I should probably point out here that this isn't a puzzle - more an impossible object - a really impossible object. Until the advent of 3D printing, you either had to have the patience of Job, or you had to know an incredibly talented woodcarver if you wanted to come close to achieving this sort of thing – nowadays, conceive it and draw it up in 3D and just print one off ... because you can! It looks cute and really freaks people out when they try and work out how it's made ...

...and that’s something that blows my mind a bit about Shapeways – I get the whole print-it-in-3D-thing, but here’s a business that enables folks to design puzzles and then get them made, one at a time, whenever someone’s interested in buying them – Shapeways handle all the logistics. That’s a powerful concept to bring to puzzle-making – and I really hope that it’ll help to bring a lot of new, interesting puzzles to the market that might not have made it if the inventors had had to build a supply chain and deal with all the logistics themselves... here’s hoping ...

DIY Twisty mods...aka Rebuilding a Mosaic Cube

A couple of weeks ago I splurged a bit (I know, dear reader, you’re struggling to imagine that, but bear with me!) on some twisty puzzles from Kayleb’s Corner – there were quite a few twisties listed so I took the opportunity to add a couple of unusual twisty puzzles to my rather limited collection (I hadn’t really been a huge fan of twisty puzzles). 

One of them was a Mosaic cube designed by Oskar van Deventer (yip, him again!) and produced by Mefferts. It’s a corner turning cube with an interesting design that creates pretty patterns when you play with it (Yes, I’m very shallow!) While it looked great, playing with it left you with the distinct feeling that it was about to disintegrate in your hands – which isn’t so great. Turns out this is reasonably well-known and documented out there in internet-land: it stems from the design of the central frame that leaves quite a lot of space free inside the cube, so pieces can slide and shift a bit more than they should in the wrong places. 

While I was reading Rob Stegmann’s latest updates, I noticed that he’s just rebuilt a Mosaic cube on a new centre and reported that it is was much improved – intrigued, I  read a bit more about it and discovered that Oskar has designed a new centre-piece and made it available via his shop on Shapeways, so I ordered one (and a couple of other things while I was there) and soon enough I had a firm black ball with 8 holes in it sitting on my desk staring at me waiting for some spare time to rebuild the Mosaic cube...

Knowing I was going to have some time to rebuild it on Saturday morning, I started taking the cube apart on Friday evening – the hardest part is popping off the caps on the corner pieces – in the end I realised the easiest way was to prise them off bit-by-bit from each of their three corners using a flat bladed screwdriver ... most of them popped off fairly easily, some were real sods to lever off without stabbing yourself with a screwdriver (once too many in answer to your next question!).  

The corner caps are aligned with three little pegs mating into three holes on the corner pieces. Some of those pegs will break off during this process – but the caps need to be glued on anyway, so don’t worry if that happens.  Once the corner caps are popped off, a Philips screwdriver will unscrew the corner pieces and the puzzle effectively disassembles itself. 

Screwing the corners into the new centre is a piece of cake and everything fits absolutely perfectly. Once the corners are screwed in, you can assemble edge and centre pieces (I found it helpful to sort them into the right layout and then work from one face to the next, building up one edge at a time). The only slightly tricky bit in the assembly process is inserting the last edge piece, but I found that unscrewing the final corner allowed enough play to squeeze in the last edge piece without the rest of them falling out... from there you need to adjust the tension on the corners to taste and pop the corner caps back on again with a little glue. 

End result – a Mosaic cube that looks as good as new, but works a lot better!  

Thanks to Rob for writing this up and telling us about it – it’s transformed my Mosaic cube from a display-only piece into a nice working puzzle. If you have an unmodified one lying around, get the new centre and rebuild it – you won’t regret it!