Stickman Illogical Puzzle Box

What a great name for a puzzle box! That name really throws down the gauntlet to any puzzler feeling up to the challenge…

Stickman Illogical Puzzle Box is Robert Yarger’s 19^th Stickman puzzle box. Twenty four copies were originally made available on Cubic Dissection back in 2009 and very few of them have appeared on any of the usual puzzle auction sites since then.

While it may not look particularly menacing, this is a brute of a puzzle box! As usual for Stickman boxes, it is beautifully made in wenge, cherry and walnut. It’s surprisingly heavy for a modest sized-box – suggesting some dense materials have been secreted inside there … it resembles a squashed cube with some strange symbols on all of the visible surfaces and comes with a set of four wooden tiles with similar symbols on some of them. The tiles clearly have magnets in them (either that or they’re possessed!) and a bit of experimentation proves that there are magnets in odd places on pretty much all of the visible surfaces of the box. Placing a tile in a specific spot will either result in it sticking or being repelled – without much clue as to which of those might be the more useful.

There’s almost no give in any of the panels (one has a little bit of movement that suggests at least what you might be trying to achieve in unlocking the box – if you make a couple of mental leaps, at least) and when you start, very little indication of what those strange symbols might mean.

The puzzle’s description tells you that you are to use the magnetic keys, properly positioned over at least 13 ‘moves’ to unlock the box and hint that the key to their correct placement is given through those pesky symbols … time to play around a little …

Although there are four triangular keys, only three will fit on any given side of the box at a time – the offset squares on each face create three positions (left, centre and right) in each of two rows (upper and lower) however the upper and lower rows overlap in the middle allowing the keys to be placed either in a V-shape or an inverted V-shape, only – that narrows things down a little, at least – however each key can fit in each position in two ways (by flipping them over) – so for each of the 4 side faces there are 48 combinations (choose 3 keys from 4, place them in one of two configurations across 3 positions i.e. [4 choose 3] * 2 * 3!). That’s still quite a lot, and if, as it turns out, you need to unlock panels in succession, you could be faced with hundreds of attempts before you find your first movement – those odds aren’t good (and anyway, I think I’m allergic to brute-force approaches like that!), so it’s probably going to be (well!) worthwhile trying to work out what those symbols mean…

There seem to be a scattering of different sorts of symbols (big dots, little dots and lines) and combinations thereof on the top and on the sides of the box – similarly the keys share the same symbols, but the combinations between the keys and positions on the sides don’t quite match up … so think this through a bit – and try and work out how the top of the box fits in with all this …

While that examination / thought process is going on I spot something a bit more subtle on the sides that instantly cuts down on the number of possibilities, significantly, and wonder how I hadn’t noticed that before … [in fact, considering how the magnets might be orientated will allow you to reduce some of the possibilities a bit further, but that still leaves a shed-load to try!]

Fiddle around on a bit of paper with the symbols on the keys and the various positions around the sides – try a few experiments, all the while constantly reminding myself not to over-complicate things (I’m predisposed to doing that, and more often than not it gets me into trouble rather than helping me out!). A couple of theories ‘almost’ work and then finally one gives a unique solution for most of the sides – but the last side resists, and yet, when you test the theory on the top of the box, something special seems to happen – which all but confirms that you’re on the right track … 

OK so we’ve got a theory that works for all bar one side, so decide to leave that one until last and hope that inspiration strikes – it quickly becomes apparent that the various sides interact in a nice predictable way, and if you want to leave the difficult side until last, you can work out where to start from, and it’s really pleasing when you apply the keys to the right spots and things ‘react’ and release the side, and then the next … until you’re looking at an open panel with the usual Stickman signature staring back at you – RESULT! (… and yeah, I left out quite a lot in the middle there somewhere … gotta leave you some entertainment of your own if you stumble across one of these little guys…)

…and the neatest thing of all: close up the sides and the box instantly resets itself back to the starting position – great if you’re wanting to rest the box for the next victim  puzzler – lousy if you close a side while you’re still trying to work out how that code works … guess when I first discovered that feature!

Not a simple puzzle – but a very rewarding one … 




Puzzling Postscript: A couple of guys came around to the house to talk and play puzzles today - and they had a shot at this one. After a while I tried to nudge them in the right direction only to realise, rather embarrassingly, that I'd forgotten how to apply one particular aspect of the code - that meant the box stayed securely locked until after the guys had left - sorry guys! It does still work properly - I was just being a dork!

Kosticks’ Geometric Works of Art

...Something special...

 

I stumbled across John and Jane Kostick’s website by accident while I was reading Gabriel Fernandes’ Tetraxis toy blog post. The Tetraxis toy looked like an interesting little novelty puzzle using some of the same sort of geometry that makes a lot of Stewart Coffin’s designs so challenging – at the end of the blog post there’s a pointer to some of the Kosticks’ other work on their website, so I surfed on over, and came across something beautiful…

Along with their special flavour of cabinetry and furniture, the Kosticks have been quietly making awesome geometrical artwork for decades – John produces intricate interlocking bronze constructions – take a look at his stars over here … and Jane produces geometric masterpieces in wood.  Their web shop sells their Tetraxis “magnetic geometry puzzles” direct and their website hints that the wooden sculptures may be available ... so I sent off an enquiring email asking whether it might be possible to get a wooden version of their Tetraxis puzzle (because I thought they looked absolutely gorgeous!) and received a reply from Jane pretty soon afterwards, full of enthusiasm, saying she’d be happy to make one up - what size, what shape, and what woods did I want? All of which sort of caught me off-guard, because I’m still not really used to crafts(wo)men like this making something up, especially for me – I was expecting to be offered something from a list of stock she had around at the moment ... I managed to get over all that and settled on a four inch set of sixteen axis sticks in a combination of maple, cherry and purpleheart. A few days later Jane offered me a matching sixteen axis silicon bronze star and it didn’t take long to say “What the heck, yes, please!”... I wandered off on my holidays and soon after I got back I had an email from Jane saying the sticks were all done and she’d be shipping them across the pond shortly. They duly arrived on Monday, along with the two plastic Tetraxis toys I’d ordered (‘cos they looked like they’d be fun to fiddle with!). 

Having a pair of the plastic Tetraxis toys means you can experiment with odd shapes and strange constructions or mix and match colours between the two standard shapes – I’m easily amused, I know... but the main attraction in the box was the fully assembled sixteen axis sculpture nestling in the corner – inside a couple of bubble-wrap bags. 

Suffice it to say that it looks a million dollars! The three different woods have all been clearly taken from the same boards - they all match perfectly – and the fit and finish is superb. Each little stick has four individual neodymium magnets placed in exactly the right spot to automagically align the structures properly as you’re building them.

The sixteen axis sculpture is made up of three layers:

- a six axis ball made up of thirty wide sticks that leave very small holes at the main intersections of three and five sticks,

- surrounded by a ten axis ball made up of thirty narrow sticks that forms a lattice around the six axis ball’s features,

- with a sixteen axis silicon bronze star deep inside all of that, with only the very tips of the major axes peeking through some of the holes in the six axis ball.

The fit between those three layers is really good as you can see from the close-up, where the shiny ball in the centre is the very tip of the silicon bronze star peeking through from inside, while the outer shell touches all of the vertices of the inner pieces it passes across – and every piece is held securely in place, with a really positive click, by those perfectly placed magnets.

Not only a beautiful piece of art to admire, but a therapeutic toy to fiddle with and experiment on. What might have started out life as a means of teaching geometrical concepts has turned into a lovely puzzling piece of art.

Keep an eye on these folks, 

I suspect you’ll be hearing more from them in the near future ... ;-)

Thanks Jane and John – I love my sculpture – all the best for your future puzzling endeavours!

[Postscript: Tetraxis toys are available from Grand Illusions in the UK.  ]