Laurie Brokenshire hosted a Gathering for Gardner Celebration of Mind at his home a couple of weeks ago
– a few of the Midlands Puzzlers made their way down to Portsmouth. Ali and Oli
drove down from London(-ish) and I picked Nigel up on my way down.
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Fans of Martin’s work started meeting every couple of years
at the Gathering for Gardner conferences
held in Atlanta in since 1993, and when he passed away in 2010, they decided to commemorate
his birthday (October 21st) with Celebration of Mind events around
the world. Anyone can organise one and log it on the G4G web-site and there are
heaps of resources and suggestions on there in case you need any ideas.
This is the third year they’ve been running G4G CoM events and
unfortunately I hadn’t been able to attend last year’s Gathering at James
Daltegy’s, so this was my first one...
Laurie had literally opened up his house for the day, we
arrived just after the official start and the kitchen was already full of folks
when we arrived. While we said hello to old friends and met new ones, Laurie
got us a cup of coffee and showed us where everything was. I added a pile of
Gill’s choc chip cookies and a chocolate tangram cake to the enormous array of
munchies on the kitchen table.
All of the first-time visitors to Laurie’s were given a
cook’s tour of the puzzles spread around the house and encouraged to have a go
at virtually everything ... including the ski tow maze on the ceiling of his puzzle room. He’d laid out a rather large chess puzzle in one
corner of the lounge, another had a huge array of disentanglements and the
tables in the dining room groaned under the combined weight of Laurie’s IPP32
puzzle haul and his goodies from the last Gathering for Gardner in Atlanta ...
and of course we’d all brought our current favourite puzzles along as well!
The numbers gradually swelled until there were thirty three
of us in attendance – quite good given that the theme for the Gathering was “three”,
and it was the third CoM – pretty good planning on Laurie’s part I reckon. ;-)
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The chess problem generally had a knot of people around it
all day as folks would wander past, read the problem (White to move and mate in
2) and then spend a while looking at the board, bouncing the odd theory off the
others who were there at the time before retiring injured. Every now and then
someone would strike upon a particularly interesting attack that no-one else could
refute and Laurie would be summoned over to adjudicate – but he always found a
weakness in the attacks ... and all day I only saw a single person whisper a
move conspiratorially in his ear and see him smile and admit it was right. It
was a cracking problem, with plenty to try, but only a single rather counter-intuitive
answer – and it stumped pretty much all of us all day long.
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The afternoon saw a series of short talks on anything
mathematical, puzzling or simply curious.
Frank Potts did a short talk about three-piece burrs,
liberally peppering his talk with real-life examples, all of which were
subsequently passed around the puzzlers to have a bash at.
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Laurie's not very good at Hide-and-Seek |
Donald gave us a talk on some puzzle ideas he’s developing
at the moment and several folks had a bash at solving some of the less trivial
challenges during the course of the day.
Adrian Fisher, maze designer par excellence, gave us a talk
that included some of his latest designs being implemented at attractions around
the world. He’d brought along a model Ames Room that he used to explain one of
his latest ideas that uses one group of visitors to unwittingly provide the
entertainment for another as they wander around the life-sized Ames Room trying
to make sense of it.
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A bit more puzzling, chatting and grazing followed before Ethel
took orders for the local Fish and Chip shop for fish suppers for all who were
interested ... and Nigel and I took the impending dinner rush as our cue to
head back up north toward Birmingham after a fantastic day.
It was wonderful meeting up with a bunch of folks who’d all
found different aspects of Martin Gardner’s work inspiring – mathematicians,
teachers, IT-folk, chaplains, builders, surgeons, salesmen, carpenters and (to lower the
tone!) actuaries ... I think that says a heck of a lot about the reach and
influence that he had. The world may be a poorer place for having lost him, but
events like this sure go a long way toward inspiring a new generation.
Thanks Laurie and Ethel for opening up your home to a bunch
of us for the day – I had a terrific time, met some wonderful new folks and was
totally baffled by not just Laurie’s magic, but by several of the puzzles I
played with as well.
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