Wil’s Bolt #3

It turns out I wasn’t the only person who’s been hassling Wil Strijbos about getting around to making some more Puzzle Bolts for sale – according to Jeff’s blog over here, he’s been doing the same thing for a while too – and it seems our collective persistence (you know who you are – pat yourselves on the back!) has paid off – Wil offered some of his Bolt #3’s for sale recently…

It’s a pretty chunky-sized bolt that’ll do a bit of damage if you accidentally drop it on something valuable, like your toe. That weight gives it an air of honesty and helps disguise its inherent duplicity – it’s a puzzle after all! 

And you know that. 

But it’s a big, solid bolt, isn’t it?

OK, so what does it look like? Looks fairly straight-forward: there’s a bolt with a nut threaded about a quarter of the way down. Said nut is apparently secured onto the bolt by means of a thin, but rather strong tube, that appears to be secured right through the nut and the bolt itself – either way, the nut can’t be moved (screwed, unscrewed or otherwise – you sneaky person you). Next up is a healthy sized washer (unbroken, but I like the fact that you’re thinking along those lines already!) and we know that the aim is to remove the washer, and return it – we know this because Wil told us – not because I made up the aim like I did for the Jugo Flower (and we all know how wrong that went!). The head of the bolt seems to have a thick spring wire ring almost all the way around it. 

… so spend a little time examining it and trying the obvious things – turns out that brute force doesn’t work after all! Spend some time examining one of the features a bit more closely and discover (lovely little A-HA! Moment) a neatly hidden little tool that’ll probably give you a big hint of what to try next – and now you’ll either get lucky and solve it, or, like I did, wonder why things don’t work the way you’re expecting them to work, retreat, scratch your head for a while – and then realise that there’s a better way, which does indeed work the way you expect it to – et voila!

Word-to-the-wise: be careful or you’ll lose a couple of the littler bits that make up the guts of the thing – that will make you sad. 

It’s a lovely little puzzle with an elegant mechanism – simple and extremely effective. Unfortunately for Wil, having acquired a Bolt #3 has just made me want to pester him to re-make more of the others even more now … anyone care to join the chorus?

Microcubology

Pocket-sized puzzling

It was great having Richard Gain (the Microcubology-guy) join us at the last MPP – not just because he’s a thoroughly nice bloke who likes talking and playing puzzles, but also because he designs and makes puzzles – and he brought a pile of his wares along for everyone to have a bash at them and potentially buy a couple – I bought 5 of them and Richard rather kindly tossed in a tiny 3-piece 3*3*3 cube for nothing. 

Richard sells his puzzles on the web through two shops – the Shapeways shop  will sell you the puzzles directly in a single colour, or you can buy them from Richard’s Etsy shop (for a little more) all ready dyed in multiple colours – IMHO that little bit more is well worth it – you’ll save yourself several hours as well as the cost of the dyes etc. 

Most of the puzzles in his shop are 4*4*4 cubes with 3cm sides – they’re manufactured using the standard Shapeways laser-sintering process and the pieces are pretty rugged (which turns out to be a rather good thing!). Given their compact size and relative strength, I reckon they make excellent puzzles for just tossing in your pocket on the off-chance that you might a puzzle to play with while you’re out or if you want something to tease / annoy / entertain (delete as appropriate) co-workers with. 

Having had the small pile of micro-cubes staring at me from my desk for a couple of weeks, I spent some time last weekend playing with them properly, and really enjoyed myself – bang-for-buck-wise or smile-per-size-wise they are simply tremendous. 

Richard has collected a couple of really interesting little cubes here – there are some by Jos Bergmans and a couple of Richard’s own designs. It’s pretty clear from his selection and his designs that he has a rather twisted mind (and you’ll see that I mean that purely in a ‘rotations required’ sort of way!).

Three tiny pieces is the cute little 3*3*3 cube that Richard was handing out for free to anyone buying his wares at MPP – it’s literally only about 15 mm on a side and requires a little precise manoeuvring - especially when trying to take the last two pieces apart: one move removes the first bit and then another four moves are required to separate the last two from one another. Given its size, it’s not likely to become the most prized puzzle in any collection – but it does demonstrate just how good 3D printing has become – the individual cube building blocks are all hollow and the walls are incredibly thin, yet the pieces are quite solid enough to produce a perfectly serviceable puzzle.

Pivot is an interesting Jos Bergmans design where the name gives a clue as to the movements involved in the solution – yip, Burr Tools may be useful for working out how the pieces might form a cube, but it won’t tell you how to assemble the pieces due to the rotations required in the solution. 

Pivot has one unusually large piece that runs almost the entire length of the edges of the assembled cube, making it an interesting ‘feature’ of the solution – and in some senses, placing it to one side and working only with the remaining pieces to solve the eventual placement does simplify things. Once you’ve done that, there should be an obvious last step (if you’re assembling – first step if you’re taking it apart) and a reasonably clear first step – that leaves you a little experimentation to work out how the jiggle the innards sufficiently to allow each piece in and then get it into the right position. Disassembly is a non-trivial exercise given the jiggery-pokery required to moves the bits about to release each successive piece. 

Twist the Night Away is a six-piece 4*4*4 cube by Tom Jolly. Again there’s a single piece that sort of stands out as the one that going to cause the trouble – it’s a complete ring that will make up most of an entire layer of the assembled cube … so once again, setting that aside and building the rest of the cube and making sure that it has a suitable waist for that ring, seems like a reasonable place to start to work out the positions in the final solution. You can eliminate a couple of bits as being fairly straightforward, but that still leaves you with the toughest part of this little puzzle – putting the second piece into the puzzle literally takes a colossal 12 moves – including a very healthy number of rotations! 

I used to be a bit wary of puzzles like this requiring rotations, because some of them are invariably “a bit tight” – so I’m not sure whether I’m forcing it to do something unnatural, or whether it really just needs a bit of encouragement. Having spent some time playing with these little puzzles, I’m happy to confirm that the ‘right way’ generally requires very little encouragement of the agricultural sort and rather more finesse – so if you find yourself needing to squeeze things a bit harder than you feel you should – stop and find the better way. Once again, disassembly in decidedly non-trivial – in fact, it’s not a long way off being as hard as assembling from scratch. Nice design, nicely executed. 

Elevator is another of Jos Bergmans’ designs for a 4*4*4 cube with a twist. Once again, this puzzle has a large awkward piece (a cranked loop) that’s certain to be the major constraint – no surprises there! 

The name also gives a pretty good description of the likely movements during the important stages – in fact you’ll have a decent combination of pivots, rotations and elevator moves all going on at the same time when you get to releasing the last few pieces while disassembling. I found myself chasing my own tail a few times even though I thought I had a pretty clear picture of where I was trying to get to – once again, even though the moves are ‘unusual’, none of them is particularly tight.

The last two micro-cubes in this post were both designed by Richard. “Roll Up! Roll Up!” has some references to not only some of the movements involved in the solution (you’re starting to notice a pattern here, aren’t you?) but also to the Big Top, inasmuch as the pieces alternate in colouring when assembling or disassembling. 

Richard’s description of the puzzle points to the two troublesome parts on this puzzle (an ‘H’-shaped piece and a cranked loop) and suggest that you start by combining those two pieces, helpfully noting that it’s “not as easy as you might think!” – Indeed, without any other encumbrances, getting those two bits together properly takes five less-than-obvious moves – again including rotations that Burr Tools won’t help with. The next two bits take a few moves each, but aren’t too troublesome before the final two pieces lock everything together rather securely. Excellent little puzzle that Richard is quite rightly rather proud of. 

Last but not least is the interestingly named Angle-C – not for its shapes or moves this time (see, I was lulling you into a false sense of complacency!) but because it was designed while on holiday on Anglesey. Geddit?! This one had me scratching my head for ages while trying to disassemble it the first time – I’d found the first piece to remove quite quickly, but then couldn’t for the life of me find the next bit to move … time and again I’d take out that piece, fiddle around fruitlessly, only to replace that first bit and put it back on the desk to stare at me for a while longer … then last weekend I had a real go at it and realised what I was missing – effectively the fit on these little Shapeways puzzles is that good that I’d missed something large right in front of my face – something that Richard’s colour scheme does a good job of disguising nicely, by the way.   

That takes care of the next couple of pieces, and the following one isn’t that tough, but it leaves you with a pair of oddly shaped almost-complete loops – and getting them to part company is rather fiddly – you’ll probably recognise the similarities to a standard bent nail puzzle, but the shapes make it a bit more complicated to execute – providing a neat little four-move sting-in-tail for this disassembly … so starting from a set of pieces and assembling it without any ideas of orientation or final position in the solution is a significant challenge. Great puzzle Richard!

POSTSCRIPT: I wrote this blog post last week and since then Richard has entered one of his latest designs (Superstrings - now available from his Shapeways store) in this year's Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition at IPP 31 in Berlin, and WON a Jury First Prize Award for his trouble! Well Done Richard!!

L-Bert Hall

Ronald Kint-Bruynseels entered this puzzle in the IPP 27 Design Competition under the full title “(Now they know how many holes it takes to fill) The L-Bert Hall” in a great take on the line from the Beatles classic “A day in the life”. The puzzles were made by Eric Fuller who subsequently offered 30 copies for sale on Cubic Dissection in October 2007. Eric’s description at the time mentioned that he was quite proud of the results and made specific reference to the box tolerances being “close for a nice fit”.

My walnut and quilted maple copy came from a recent Cubic Dissection Auction and I was very chuffed when I managed to secure it with a reasonable bid.

Four years on, there’s still a lot of evidence of those close tolerances – half of the pieces refused to exit box when it arrived in Blighty, despite my ‘encouragement’ of the agricultural variety! A few days on the windowsill in the full, mighty glare of the English sun (40W equivalent for those of you not familiar with this particular phenomenon) had loosened the pieces sufficiently to allow a more elegant exit.

Ostensibly this is a really simple little puzzle made up of nine identical pieces: three blocks in an L-shape with a perpendicular dowel protruding from one block and holes drilled through the other two blocks. The aim is to build a 3*3*3 cube to fit in the (rather snug) box (so clearly the dowels can’t face outwards, but I like your thinking!).

Intuitively it feels like it should be a fairly simple puzzle, and indeed, if those jolly dowels weren’t there it would be! Burr Tools confirms that if the dowels weren’t there, there would be 111 ways of arranging those pieces into a cube, however, the introduction of those dowels makes the solution unique(!).

I haven’t managed to come up with a clever way of deducing what the answer must look like (any suggestions from anyone “out there”?), so I’ve been reduced to a form of brute-force attack – but thankfully there are only 9 pieces, and they’re identical, so you can crank through alternatives fairly efficiently…

…a couple of weeks on and the fit is still extremely snug, so I’m airing the pieces on the windowsill for a while longer – with the fierce English sun burning down on them I’m sure that when winter arrives and the central heating really kicks in they’ll be back to designer specifications.

Jugo Flower

Wil Strijbos sent out another of his famous emails recently announcing that he’d had a few items made up in case anyone was interested – my response was meant to be “I’ll take one of each, thanks” but I wasn’t paying enough attention and missed the fact that there were two variants of the impossible dovetail on offer ... any-hoo, the latest box of tricks duly arrived with a dovetail, a bolt and a Jugo Flower…
 

While I was waiting for the parcel to arrive, Wil had asked for some help on some words of warning on the handling of the Jugo Flower because the mechanism can be damaged if not treated properly - so I’d had a bash at it before I received mine and then added some further bits to it after I’d had a bit of a play with it. 

So, courtesy of myself, the object of the Jugo Flower is to turn all the petals over, and then return the puzzle to the starting position – there are fifteen brass petals radiating out from an aluminium centre – said centre has four arrows marked on it (at positions 4,6,11 and 14 if you’re interested, although you’ll realise that the only interesting thing is the size of the gaps between them) and the petals opposite the arrows can be twisted and flipped over – all together (no differential), and while the petals are all horizontal, the petals can be turned around the centre, effectively moving the four arrows around – got it?

Just after I’d received my puzzle, Wil asked if I’d mind putting something on my blog about it, and of course I agreed (potentially he holds my sanity in his hands, best be nice to him!) – so here you are: 

First thoughts – it’s a really nicely made version, beautifully machined and mechanically fairly sturdy – yes, you need to make sure that things are lined up and all flat before you turn the petals around the centre (they jam if you don’t), but other than that, it behaves exactly as expected. [Ali, one of my puzzle-mates, helpfully suggested resting the puzzle on a large roll of sticky tape to get everything properly horizontal. Great idea! ] The petals all have pictograms representing Chinese signs of the Zodiac (Thanks to Jerry for pointing that out!) etched on one side and are milled out on the reverse – so there’s a distinct difference between the two sides...

While I was waiting for the puzzle to arrive, I did a little Googling and found that the Jugo Flowers (or “Game Jugo”) have been mentioned several times on the TwistyPuzzles.com Forum.

There’s a discussion on TwistyPuzzles.com in February this year that mentions it as one of the rarest puzzles around with an initial sample run of some 7 puzzles produced ... I suspect that Wil might be helping to solve that ‘problem’. 

Tony Delgado mentions the Jugo Flower in his interesting column on the “Game Set Watch” site about “Lights Out”-type puzzles over here.

…and then I found a link to some beautiful photo’s of a couple of examples from Hendrik Haak’s collection over here.

Finally, there are some discussions of the Jugo Flower on the TwistyPuzzles.com Forum in 2004, some of them involving discussions about an example that one Wil Strijbos had been showing some folks at a Dutch Cubing Day ... and some analysis by Jaap Scherphuis – including a comment that he’d mentioned to Wil that it was a pity that it could not be placed in the position that all of the petals had been turned over ... (Hang on!)

Which got me thinking (yes, it was painful!) ... perhaps I’ve led (a tiny part of) the puzzling world astray by suggesting that the aim is to turn all of the petals over – whereas in fact the aim should be to mess them up and return them all to a face up position ... which given the combinations of petals linked together, is possibly challenge enough. 

Here’s my logic: petals can be up or down – it’s binary (there’s no differential gearing remember, and you can’t move the petals unless they’re all horizontal), the order of flipping doesn’t matter (‘cos it’s binary) just which sets of four petals you flip in any group of moves (i.e. for any set of moves the order doesn’t affect the end-state), you’re always going to flip four petals at a time – which in turn means that you will ALWAYS have an even number of petals faced down – and fifteen isn’t an even number ... end of, or QED if you’re Latin. 

(Jaap uses some far more rigorous maths incorporating what looks like group theory and matrices to prove some general cases and then merely refers to some of the rules that he’s proved to show that it’s not possible – in his own words: “I have since worked out that of the 2^15 seemingly possible states, only 2^12 are achievable. The quiet patterns are the 2^3 that have 5-fold symmetry.” – Sorry, it’s been a while since I was able to do any of that sort of really clever stuff – you’re best off reading his pages over here.)

I did go through a phase in the middle of that little journey where I had convinced myself that there must be something mechanical in the puzzle that allows an ‘unusual’ move somehow and explored all of the possibilities that I could think of, and couldn’t find anything suitable, so I’ve settled on the analysis above … and to my mind it sort-of fits in with my email exchanges with Wil so far and ties in with what I’ve read on the TwistyPuzzles.com Forum (and most importantly, Jaap’s proof sounds very convincing to a neophyte!). 

If I’m wrong, hopefully Wil or another (better) puzzler will be in touch shortly and humiliate me publicly! :-) 

 

... but in the mean time, I think it’s a really nicely made reproduction of an extremely rare puzzle – it’s not “too hard” and should be accessible to most puzzlers – the concept is really simple to explain and solutions can be quite puzzling as the “just-before-the-end” state is asymmetric and not immediately obvious, allowing you easily walk right past it, figuratively speaking. 

Really glad to have one in my collection, but suspect that it’s going to appeal more to collectors than to casual puzzlers!

Triple Locked Box

My journey to getting one of Eric Fuller’s Triple Locked Boxes is a little unusual – at least for me. I’d seen the puzzle listed in the gallery over at Cubic Dissection while I was randomly surfing around looking at pictures of nice puzzles (and there are some very nice puzzles in that gallery!). In spite of Eric’s description (his opening line is: “Although it looks relatively modest on the outside, this is a phenomenally difficult puzzle box to open.”) I hadn’t really paid a huge amount of attention to it. I’d seen one or two of them on the usual auctions and hadn’t really lusted after it much.

Earlier this year there was a short conversation on the Renegades Forum where someone was asking about a video that Eric had produced demonstrating the mechanism – and a link to the video was duly produced. Being the inquisitive sort, I had a look at the video – it’s fair to say that it blew my little mind, rather comprehen- sively. Any video of a puzzle solution that starts halfway through the solution with the opening remark that “I’ll start from this position because most people have been able to get this far” deserves attention! I love the unspoken implication in there that most people haven’t been able to get past this point – and then seeing Eric demonstrating what comes next makes it pretty clear why not many people had made it past that point – it also made me want to add one of them to my little collection, rather seriously!

One came up on the latest round of Cubic Dissection auctions and I managed to acquire it … as a puzzle box it is fairly modest-looking, possibly even nondescript, if that’s a fair description of a beautifully finished albeit reasonably featureless box. Eric made “approx 34” (which struck me as an interestingly specific generalisation) in a variety of different woods – some of them had different woods on the outside, this one was finished entirely in quilted maple – a lovely, interesting-looking wood and the innards are made from padauk.

Being four and a half years old now, the first move pretty much does itself – in the process establishing it’s credentials as a Japanese-style sliding panel box, and indeed the next five or six moves reinforce that assumption perfectly and result in the top of the box being partially open … and this is the state where Eric’s video starts …

At this point there’s a compartment inside the box available to you that has a revolving false floor that appears to be hiding a little aluminium and steel tool. The false floor is clearly revolving on a pair of pins and seems to serve purely to hide (albeit not that successfully!) this little aluminium tool. The false floor is pretty obvious since it’s at half depth in the box, but doesn’t give you much of a suggestion on how to progress…

There isn’t anything obvious worth trying with the tool you’ve discovered and you might even be tempted into thinking that you’ve finished (because you can’t find anything else to do – perhaps the tool was what you were really after) although there’s clearly still a lot of box you haven’t got into yet … and if I’m honest, if I hadn’t seen Eric’s clip of what comes next, I’d have spent a long time staring at this state.

At this point the only way to work toward the solution would be to start exploring out-the-box suggestions.  Eric’s description includes the line: “this box would not have been possible without my recent metalwork experience” and up to now, none of the mechanics have really relied on much metalwork, and indeed waving a compass around the box confirms that somethings trying to realign the Earth’s magnetic fields – yet finding an accessible magnet is quite a mission – there is one, but it’s so beautifully hidden that I wouldn’t be surprised if most folks never find it without a bit of a nudge – Eric deserves a medal for that aspect alone, IMHO.

Having freed that tool, you still have three things to do, in order, and be warned: they’re as well hidden as the last step! There’s a really satisfying feeling as you do each in order and sense the progress you’re making until the lid is finally able to slide all the way off … now you’re done!

Certainly not the most beautiful puzzle box I have – but definitely one of the toughest! I’m very chuffed to have been able to add this one to my humble collection.