DCD 2012 aka MPP8

Just over a year ago Nigel and I flew across to The Netherlands to attend the 2011 Dutch Cube Day in Eindhoven. Luckily our fellow MPP-er Louis lives in Eindhoven and he took care of us while we were over there ... afterwards I blogged about it a bit and we talked about it to all and sundry at subsequent MPPs ... and it seems that folks liked what they heard. This time Nigel and I were joined for an early Saturday morning flight from Birmingham by Chris, and Ali and Oli flew across to Amsterdam from Luton. We all met up with Louis who’d caught the train from Eindhoven to Schipol and then the six of us made our way across to The Hague, scene of this year’s DCD. 

We all managed to check-in when we got there, although there were a couple of fraught minutes until the hotel found Ali’s booking in the name of Mr Alistair instead of the more orthodox use of his surname. When the hotel restaurant opened at 11:30 we all piled in for some lunch as most of us had been at the airport from 4:30 that morning. While we were happily munching away Wil Strijbos pulled up in his red van and hopped out with Christiaan Eggermont. They joined us for a bite to eat after they’d checked in and then headed off to the venue to unpack Wil’s wares for the Sunday. 

We walked round there after lunch and notionally helped Wil unpack his crates in order to justify our presence. Bernhard Schweitzer had obviously been there for a while already as most of his stuff was already unpacked. It was great to see Bernhard again after a bit more than a year at the previous DCD. I spotted Joop doing his rounds as one of the organisers and reminding the prospective sellers that they were supposed to be saving their trading for the next day – although I did notice a couple of my mates coming out of there with little parcels or treasure in spite of Joop’s best endeavours. 

Rob's well-laid dining table

Mid-afternoon we all headed off toward Rob Hegge’s place for a bit of a puzzle party. We’d spoken about DCD in Washington and I’d mentioned there would be a bunch of us MPP-ers coming over so he’d offered to organise a bit of a get-together. We arrived with Wil and Christiaan in tow to Rob, Frans de Vreugd and Simon Nightingale all furiously puzzling away, and a little while later Rik van Grol and the rest of the gang arrived. (Only half of us could fit in the red van so the others took a cab from the hotel.) 

Rob had laid his dining room table with all of his IPP puzzles and about half of us promptly sat down (after we’d said hello to everyone, promise!) and began confusing ourselves. The rest scattered themselves around his lounge peering into the many cabinets jam-packed with puzzles. Rob was a great host keeping us plied with caffeine and fruit juice and the odd round of snacks. He happily sought out some of the less well known puzzles in his collection and hauled them out for folks to have a go on ... Nigel for one was glad to be able to give one of Brian Young’s big Telephone Boxes a bit of a once over. Not sure anyone opened the (Karakuri) Grand Piano though...

I spent a while trying my hand at Tan-Talizing and failed miserably, only to see Louis solve it in a matter of minutes, take his customary photo of the solved puzzle and then break it up while I tried not to watch... although I have to say that he did a very good job of obscuring anything useful in the process. 

At one point Rob brought out his Roger Shaker and Ali had a pretty good go at it, actually solving it! Locking it up again proved a bit tougher and we had to drag Wil in to try and salvage the position... and even though Wil was seen prancing around the room performing all manner of strange callisthenics, the puzzle remained resolutely open ... sorry Rob.

We had to drag ourselves away from Rob’s treasure trove to meet Bernhard back at the hotel for some Italian and just managed to get back in time to find him, and after dumping our gear, we all (11 of us!) set off following Bernhard to an Italian joint he remembered from previous visits ... after a couple of false starts and wrong turns we found it and they pushed a few tables together for us. I knew the food was going to be superb when Bernhard didn’t hesitate and ordered his standard Carpaccio and a main course (read last year’s story if that doesn’t make sense!). Several courses of superb food duly followed, liberally interspersed with some (apparently) very fine wine ... with several puzzles floating around the table among the courses. As always the banter was highly entertaining and when Louis noticed that the wall tiles looked a bit like the panels on a puzzle box, he proceeded to try and solve the wall! (And he was stone cold sober at the time, promise!) It was an outstanding meal with fantastic company ... and if you’re ever in Voorburg, you could do a lot worse than look up Fratelli's for a bite to eat! (You’re on your own on the company though...) 

Back at the hotel, we found ourselves drawn to the bar area for yet more puzzling and I eventually stumbled up to my bed just before midnight...

Next morning Louis and I headed back to the venue a little after the opening time and the rest of the gang followed along at a more leisurely pace having sussed out Wil and Bernhard’s tables the previous afternoon. 

Anyone seen Vinco?

This year DCD was held in Sint Maartenscollege in the school hall, with tables set up for the speed-cubers down one side and puzzle tables taking up pretty much the rest of the hall... and clearly a lot of new folks had arrived between us leaving there on Saturday and getting back on Sunday – there were stacks of new puzzle tables piled high with interesting puzzles, optical illusions and games. 

We signed in and each received a micro three-piece cube puzzle courtesy of Richard Gain (the microcubologist) and the organisers – a really nice touch!

Inside the room it was wonderful recognising puzzlers from DCD last year and from Washington earlier this year – every one of them stopped to say hi and ask how we’d been in the interim – good people... 

Wil had brought a couple of things along for me, including a Five Nails puzzle from Jan Sturm for my Shropshire puzzle mate Dale, and a couple of Cola Bottles (#5 and #7B) to add to my collection – but I’ll be writing about those in due course...

Jack Krijnen had a table selling some of his designs (you’re not likely to come across Burrly Sane available for sale like that...) and had a few placed out for folks to play around with ... including a very simple looking 2D puzzle consisting of about 5 pieces and the object is to make the classic outline of a house... WAY tougher than it looks and I’m still kicking myself for not taking a copy...

Ceremonial handover

My main reason to looking out for Jack was linked to our meeting at DCD last year. Just before that he’d published a couple of pics on a forum of a tiny burr set he’d crafted for himself, and in the interim he’d decided to make a few more copies for sale, and I’d managed to get in early enough to secure a copy and I was going to be picking it up at DCD ... it really deserves an entire post on it’s own, and that’s what it’ll get – but for now I’ll just say that it is even better in the flesh than it looks in the pics and it is an awesome piece of woodwork! [Thanks Jack!] 

We spent pretty much the whole day wandering between the tables and noticing new things each time we went past a table ... the lunch that the organisers laid on was great and the Midlands Mob spent a while munching and talking puzzles with Simon and Frans while giving our legs a bit of a break...

After lunch we had a couple of lectures – firstly from Frans de Vreugd on his puzzle-hunting trip to Sri Lanka with Peter Hajek. Frans entertained us with some great stories and interesting insights, all illustrated with a terrific set of photos from the trip and a bunch of carved objects all of which had secret compartments hidden inside them. As most of us hadn’t been exposed to any puzzle boxes from Sri Lanka, it made for a really interesting talk. He was followed by Edo Timmermans who gave an inspiring talk on modelling mathematical constructions using simple little magnetic balls – the sort we’ve all played around with at some point... except that his creations were on an EPIC scale – take a look at his YouTube channel and I guarantee that you’ll be thoroughly amazed at what can be done with these simple little ‘toys’ in the right hands.

Fidgety Rabbits (the white things they're holding!)

After that I spent a while chatting with Goetz Schwandtner who’d brought along a couple of really fascinating derivatives of the standard Chinese rings ... the first was a copy of the Fidgety Rabbits puzzle from this year’s Design Competition – it’s a binary implementation with 7 sliders, each of which can be in one of two states... then he brought out a special version by the same creator (Namick Salakhov) which had a ternary implementation, with just 6 sliders! He passed it around and everyone had a fiddle around with it and we all went a little way into the sequence and then allowed discretion to take over and reversed back to the start position... the binary one was opened a few times but nobody really tried to go all the way through the ternary example. Goetz spent a while talking us through the design which is rather ingenious as it will generalise to any higher order implementation desired – clever design that! [There’s a much better pic of the two next to each other on Goetz’ web page.] 

One of the other things Goetz had brought along was a Lego (genius!) implementation of a Bob Hearn design that had never been made before – even though it theoretically only has three rings, the number of moves involved was simply astronomical! In fact Goetz hadn’t even determined the number of moves required to fully solve it – jolly creative that Goetz bloke! :-) 

The Dutch Cube Day really is a tremendous opportunity to meet some amazing puzzlers, manufacturers, sellers and designers... 

Where else could you get one of Oskar’s designs autographed by the man himself (yip, I did!), or where could you tell Robrecht Louage how much you enjoyed 4 Steps Visible Lock, or chat to Vinco, or talk to Marcel Gillen about his old puzzles and his more recent designs, play with some really exotic twisty puzzles and rake through crate after crate after crate of wonderful goodies from Wil Strijbos. It’s a wonderful opportunity for all of the above, and you get to make some excellent new friends ... all for the princely sum of ten Euros for the day! You cannot beat that for puzzling value for money! If you haven’t already joined NKC, drop Rik a line and sign up and then join us in Holland next year ... if you love puzzles you won’t regret it!

Obligatory loot shot.

Gathering for Gardner @ Laurie’s

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. 

Martin Gardner, just in case you haven’t already come across this incredible gent, probably did more to popularise mathematics and puzzles through his columns in Scientific American and his 100-or-so books, than anyone else around. He introduced folks to recreational mathematics through puzzles and interesting articles that were pitched at just the right level to appeal to anyone with a little curiosity. I first stumbled across his books while I was still at school and found that the way he described interesting concepts was always thoroughly accessible and drew the reader in ... 

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. ;-) 

The morning and the early part of the afternoon were given over to mingling, chatting, puzzling and playing with unusual objects, with several folks taking a turn at the True Mirror with and without the Reversing Goggles. Very trippy and more than a little disconcerting ... especially when you wink at yourself in the mirror and the “wrong” eye winks back at you!

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. 

Ali had brought his latest purchase, a Morphing Cube by Gare Maxton along for us to play with ... and a couple of the guys managed it and I needed to get him to show me the solution after playing with it for ages ... and I’m not surprised I didn’t find it as the solution involves some interesting articulating of the pieces to inveigle them into the structure ... it’s a gorgeous lump of metal that weighs about 7 lbs – you wouldn’t want to drop this bad boy on your toe!

Simon Nightingale was wandering around the rooms with his three block conundrum. With no more than his usual showmanship, Simon introduces a special box containing three identical blocks, the box is covered with a black cloth and the three blocks are laid on top of the covered box. Folks take turns lifting the three blocks together, and then picking up just the top block ... and all without fail get a stupid “I don’t believe that!” look on their faces and those that haven’t lost the power of speech then ask how the single block can possibly weigh more than the three blocks together... theories of magnets and complicated devices hidden in the box abound and when everyone has had a go, Simon would show that there was actually nothing in the box and the effect has taken place entirely inside your head which has created the illusion for you... that one was a great talking point with plenty of analysis afterwards. 

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. 

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. 

The talks were drawn to a close with a great magic show that baffled the adults and entertained the kids royally. 

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.

Karakuri duo: humour and torment!

A couple of months ago Wil Strijbos let me know that he had an interesting Karakuri box going spare and he thought I’d like it, so we traded a couple of emails and he took it along to IPP32 knowing that he’d see me there, and that if I didn’t want it, there might be an orderly queue of a couple of hundred puzzlers just behind me who would want to take it off his hands.

Flemin’ was created by Shiro Tajima in mid-2010 in this format, and then redone in a slightly different form as TNK, with a racoon’s tail sticking out of one corner of the box.

It starts out looking like a pretty unassuming cube with a set of offset inlaid lines on each side ... after a couple of seconds in the hands, it soon becomes clear that this is unlike any other Karakuri box you’ve ever seen (OK, unlike any Karakuri box I’ve ever seen ... I’m still new to this, remember?).

It seems to consist of an outer shell and an inner cube. The outer shell comes apart into two opposite halves joined around a common corner. You can slide the shell halves outwards in orthogonal directions determined by pegs in the inside of the outer shells that are keyed into paths on the outside of that inner cube. They will let you slide the outer shells all the way apart on a single axis, or halfway out on orthogonal axes. The whole time you’re fiddling around with this, you seem to be getting absolutely nowhere – paying closer attention to the details yields little by way of further clues – exploring your way around all of the faces of the cube confirms there isn’t a secret exit on one of the path ways. Trying to directly manipulate the internal cube brings absolutely no joy either...

In case you hadn’t worked it out yet, this was the one that was tormenting me! I left it on my shelf-of-puzzles-to-be-solved (rather full since IPP32!) and would have a go at it every now and then ... I’d pass it to visiting puzzlers and they too were flummoxed ... after a few weeks of trying this on and off I found myself trying increasing more and more pressure on some of my experiments and stopped myself short of doing any damage by hauling out the solution and consulting it, choosing to admit defeat rather than risk damaging some fine Japanese craftsmanship ... and I’m glad I did – I’d probably have pulled it apart if I’d carried on the way I was going ... it’s clever – very clever ... and it beat me fair and square!

The second Karakuri box I got from Wil in DC is called Drawer in Drawer (or Chest in Chest depending on where you're looking) and it’s a cute little cubic box with a pair of drawers on one side and a handle on the top – and your mission is to open the two drawers...

Your first port of call really should be to tug on the two drawer handles on the front (you’re not that jaded are you?!)  and they move a bit, but not nearly enough to open ... trying that in different orientations just in case there might be gravity locks doesn’t provide much more assistance and soon enough you’ll be off exploring the other aspects of the box that might be hiding some of the usual Karakuri tricky bits...

...and it probably won’t take you very long to find something interesting, and what happens next is guaranteed to put a smile on on the face of even the most cynical of puzzlers – the humour in this one is absolutely terrific – and takes you by surprise ... I tested my theory at our last Midlands Puzzle Party and wasn’t disappointed – they all smiled at that bit...  

This puzzle was one of the winners in the 3rd Karakuri Puzzle Idea Contest - from  a design submitted by Mr Hideki Niwa and crafted by Hiroshi Iwahara ... and it was given the rather aptly named "Astonishment Grand Prize" ... which fits ... absolutely.

Thanks Wil – they’re both great – for very different reasons... :-)