Jesse Born’s Pi PuzzleBox

Jesse Born arrived on the puzzle box scene a couple of years ago and his work has been getting more and more rave reviews with each new production. My mates started buying his puzzles and they raved about them – a lot… so when he published some pics of little slices of pie that he was making for his current project, I decided I shouldn’t miss out on this one, and duly pre-ordered one.

Over the course of the following month or so Jesse teased us with a few more pics along the way, asked for the group’s opinion on the finish we preferred (and then duly went along with the group’s preference for a satin finish in spite of most of his earlier works having a glossy finish) and then shipped a bunch of them to expectant puzzlers around the world…

While mine was in transit my mate Jim announced to the world that this was probably his favourite puzzle of the year… my expectations ramp up a notch or three, and when it arrived it really is stunning – I mean, don’t get me wrong, Jesse’s photos are pretty damn good, but this thing’s even more gorgeous in the flesh – I waste no time in telling him that…

You get a nine-sided box – with an obvious lid decorated with slices of yosegi pie. There’s evidence of a hinge on one of the sides and the pie slices are all separated. Jesse’s description tells you that in order to unlock the box, you’ll have to slide all of the slice into the centre… OK…

So let’s start sliding them and see what happens… ah – slight problem – they wont slide in… or at least most of them won’t slide in… so we start fiddling around a little bit and then something really strange happens and catches me totally off guard – and I love it when a puzzle does that to me!

This opens up a few more possibilities, but soon enough I find myself down a blind alley with no means of progressing … with all bar one or two slices fully inward… and yet, nowhere near a solution. 

I find myself alternately playing with the box, and thinking about the box, and trying to concentrate more on the latter than on the former, remembering just how enthusiastic the x maths prof had been about it, and thinking to myself that there must be a lot more to this box than some random moves along a solution path – there must be meaning in it…

…and then it hits you, it’s been there all along – and I try a few clumsy attempts at enforcing my new theory on the puzzle, but none of them quite works properly… until I go right back to basics and theorise on something that seems even more promising – and find the right way to think about things – and allowing for a little bit of jiggling here and there, it all works perfectly from start to finish… with the last move unlocking the box allowing the lid to swing up and open – to show Jesse’s signature branding inside the lid…

…and it’s clear exactly why Jim is such a fan! The mathematics at the heart is wonderful – but the way the solution is fed into the box is very clever – I wouldn’t have thought that would work, and yet it does… and then there’s the small matter of implementing all of those rules in a wooden object… I don’t think calling it genius is going too far! 

The icing on the cake for me is that Jesse’s left access to the mechanics for the interested puzzler – pulling out a couple of pins and pegs you can see exactly how he’s implemented the opening rules… if you haven’t had a look at it, do – you will be impressed…

When I told Jesse the box had arrived safely in the wilds of Barnt Green, he asked me to tell him what I thought, honestly, so here you go, Jesse: “I have only two words for you: Genius and Stunning!”