(Another) Puzzling Cruise

Gill and I went on a fantastic Baltic Cruise for our main summer holiday this year... we sailed from Harwich and despite concerns about the treacherous North Sea crossing, virtually all of our sailing was wonderfully smooth.

Certain that I wouldn't be able to last almost two whole weeks without some puzzles, I made sure that I took some toys along to keep me amused between all the eating, sight-seeing, shows, eating, movies and of course eating. 

Keen to make sure that I could get the maximum amount of puzzling out of the minimum amount of space (even though we didn't have to fly to meet our cruise and effectively had no luggage restrictions at all!) I took along some multiple challenge-type puzzles and one that I thought would be really hard...

First up I took along three sets of Tantrix Match puzzles that I'd bought from Tomas at Sloyd.

Before I left I'd noticed that the three sets all used the same pieces and boards, so I took along a single board and pieces and three sets of challenges ( Basic, Family and Expert). [The other Tantrix Match set I wrote about previously uses the same pieces as well... FWIW.] 

Each of the sets of challenges has a variety of difficulty levels among their twelve puzzles, with the Basic set having predominantly easier puzzles, the Expert having predominantly harder puzzles and the Family set having a nice balance between the two extremes.

I worked my way through all of the challenges starting with the Basic set up through to the hardest ones in the Expert pack. It was great having a puzzle handy that I could dip into every now and then and spend as little or as long as I had without feeling like you'd lose a train of thought (or a set of positions you'd already tried) - although some of the later problems definitely needed a more systematic approach every now and then...

As you'd expect the easier problems can generally be dispatched in a matter of minutes (some literally only have a couple of permutations for the first few pieces) whereas some of the later problems ended up taking me several ten or fifteen minute sessions to find the solution. Great puzzle to dip in and out of and plenty of puzzling for relatively little bulk - i.e. a good travelling puzzle!

The second puzzle I took along to work on was Ton Delsing's Cat and Dog Sliding puzzle... while this one may look pretty benign, it has a few little quirks that Ton helpfully described when I met him at Wil's place a few weeks earlier. First of all the central column can only be entered from the top or bottom row (you can't slide inwards from the side positions) and one of the blank pieces in the central column is limited to only being able to move between the two middle blocks of the centre column ... which gives you an outer ring for circulating the pieces and the ability to swap a piece into the centre where it won't circulate.

The starting position has "CAT and Dog" across the top and then the words "DOG" and "CAT" running down, so all you have to do is swap either the sets of letters of the individual words around to get them properly lined up...

Before I left on the cruise I'd begun idly playing around with it and had managed to massively scramble it ... so I thought it would make a good puzzle to take along on the cruise... unfortunately it was too good a puzzle to take on the cruise and in spite of several sessions of trying to get the hang of it, it has come home just as scrambled as it was when I left on holiday ... so Ton wins, for now...

By the way, it's cleverly designed, right down to the locking piece to keep things where you left them...

The third puzzle I took along for the ride was a copy of Ivan's Hinge that I'd picked up from Amazon. Ivan's Hinge is a loop of triangular plastic pieces with hinges between each adjoining triangle that will enable every joint to be folded either way. Each triangle has a combination of red, orange or blue colouring. There's a deck of cards with a challenge printed on each side of the cards and your goal is to fold the loop so that you get the shape indicated on the card with the colouring matching that on the card...

Things start out pretty simply with having to make a red square against a blue background ... and if you've done it properly, turning it over will match the next challenge: an orange square against a blue background.

As you work your way through the challenges, not only does the colouring get a bit more challenging, but the shapes start to get a little more unusual as well ...a good fun couple of hours puzzling in between all the eating, and some other stuff on the cruise.

 

n-ary therapy

I reckon these two puzzles are probably the closest to puzzling therapy you can find...

I picked up a copy of Thinkfun’s Spin Out via Amazon recently because I reckoned that every puzzle collection needs a copy... based on the Gray code principle, each of the seven dials needs to be in a horizontal position in order to allow the central slider to move out – but since each of the dials interferes with its neighbours you need to follow a series of moves to successively unlock each dial ... except that you’ll find that you need to keep going backwards and forwards ... and in the end it takes 85 moves to get the central slider out... 

 

Helpfully this version of Spin Out has a short-cut back to the beginning in the form of an opening on the side that lets you insert the central slider in the locked position...neat! 

...by the way, if you’re interested – Spin Out was invented by William Keister while working at Bell Labs where a colleague, Frank Gray, had invented a technique for error correction in electronic communications ... which subsequently became known as the Gray Code ... see the link there... :-)

[Jaap Scherphuis’ wonderfully useful website has some great analysis of Spin Out –  - including a recursive formula for working out how many moves are required for this sort of puzzle – L(n) = L(n-1) + 2*L(n-2) + 1, starting with L(1)=1 and L(2)=2 ... which all collapses down to L(n) = INT [2^(n+1) / 3].   ]

 

The second bit of n-ary therapy comes in the form of Crazy Elephant Dance by Markus Götz. I got this one from Peter Knoppers when I met up with him at Wil’s – Peter sells them as laser-cut wooden kits for a jolly decent price and I spent a couple of hours putting it all together. The bits all go together quite easily and the kits have been designed to ensure that the critical alignment is all taken care of with the help of a bunch of cocktail sticks – clever...

 

Once it was all together, the first order of business was actually locking the puzzle up – you build the frame and the slider separately and then have to progressively lock the puzzle up. The dials on this puzzle take the shape of cute elephants and the twist here is that whereas Spin Out was binary-based with each dial having two interesting positions (vertical or horizontal), this one has three interesting positions (up, right and down) – a ternary Gray code. With only 5 dials / elephants to contend with, the requirements of the ternary design still provides a reasonably lengthy solution path to free the central slider.

 

The elephants all start with their trunks in the air and there’s a single turning circle where elephants can be rotated, their neighbours permitting. Once you have all the trunks pointing downwards, the slider will be free.

This one’s not only a fun puzzle to build yourself, but the rhythm of running backwards and forwards through the solution path is definitely therapeutic! 

...and I don’t that I’m the only one who thinks that as it won an honourable mention at the 2005 Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition.

Puzzlers being generous, again...

[Today’s blog post comes from a very hot St Petersburg...]

It feels like ages ago since I visited Wil Strijbos for his last-in-a-while-Queens Day Party, and I still have a few thank-you’s to say... so here goes:

 

Thanks Michel for the mini-Stressful – having made a few larger ones, I can only imagine how fiddly these little guys must have been to make ... and at least I didn’t have any of them actually break in half on me(!). It’s sitting next to the bigger, clumsier ones that I made a little while back...

Thanks to Wil not just for a wonderful day’s puzzling and a fabulous Chinese meal afterwards, but also for the three little laser cut interlocking assemblies... two of them come with a picture of the target shape (both dodecahedrons, if memory serves) and the last one asks you to make something beautiful with the pieces...!

The green one (“clover”) goes together fairly easily and the pink one (“cherry blossom”) is a bit trickier as the overhanging edges are a lot larger and tend to get in the way and confuse things a bit more... I thought I’d finished that one and on inspection found that quite a few of the joints hadn’t actually been properly put together ... lovely little assembly challenge – particularly for us ham-fisted types!

 

The third one consists of 10 yellow triangles, and as I discovered after a while experimenting with various forms, the cuts aren’t all made equal (if you stack the other two sets of pieces in any orientation, the cuts always line up...with these ones, you need to rotate them to get them all to line up....) – OK so having noticed that, further exploration was a bit more fruitful and I realised that I could do something interesting with about half of the pieces ... and then added the second half in a similar vein, et voila – it’s beautiful ... and a little surprising!  Thanks Wil

 

Going back a little further even, I owe Tomas Linden a huge THANK YOU for all the extra goodies he included in my last order...

There was a large extra white box in with my last order and that turned out to be protecting a really neat wooden display case with a glass lid perfectly sized to fit three Hanayama Cast Puzzle boxes... inside there was a whole heap of extra puzzling goodies.

The first thing I noticed was a serious collector’s piece – an old Columbus Egg tangram puzzle, complete with its original packaging and challenge booklet ... I suspect that has just become the oldest puzzle in my collection – and it’s still in great nick.

There was also a fairly non-descript puzzle box that I recognised as one that Oli had brought to one of our very first MPP gatherings at my place a couple of years ago ... I think it’s an Alan Boardman design that it deliciously simple, yet thoroughly bamboozling if your haven’t seen it before – it fooled me for ages when I first saw it so I’m really chuffed to have one of my own now to inflict on the unwary ... rattling around inside it was a Tantrix key ring ... as I’d just ordered a set of the Tantrix Match puzzle sets in that order... (and I’ve been working my way through those on this cruise).

There were a couple of interesting little plastic baggies – one with a sticker on it saying “Take your lady on a movie night” – and inside there were six little flick-books each with its own fun little animation ...

The second little baggie had stacks of little odd-shaped pieces of curly birch (?) ... and the label explains this to be “Allard Walker’s personal FIX KIT for Symmetrick | Sloyd (c) 2013” – after the hard time I gave Tomas about how hard Symmetrick was as a puzzle, and how long I spent trying to build three dimensional solutions to it (in my defence, he has form there!) he’s given me a set of extra pieces to enable me to build just about any shape I’d care to build – now even I should be able to make something symmetrical flat on the table! Love it!

Thanks Tomas – not only a lovely surprise, but some wonderful puzzles to add to the collection – thanks for helping me fill up that new cabinet I added to the cave.

Karakuri binge

[This blog post comes to you from somewhere off the Swedish coast in the Baltic Sea ... if this works...]

...recently I’ve been on a bit of a Karakuri box binge...  it started out reasonably cheaply when I picked up a New Secret Box III (among a number of other nice little puzzles from Japan) for a smashing price.

On the outside it’s a reasonably handsome looking box with three stripes on it (for III – the other versions have one and two stripes respectively). It’s a fairly simple box conceptually – each panel needs to be moved, in the right order, all around the box ... and you need to work your way around the box three times (hence III, again) – there are no particular tricks to it as each panel successively unlocks the next, and so on, until the final move releases the lid which then slides open.

Inside the box is a little thing of beauty! Wonderfully made and a terrific introduction to Japanese puzzle boxes for anyone who hasn’t seen one yet – the complexity of the pieces and their accuracy is a lovely thing to behold...

I also picked up a Kamei Dice Box from Satomi – the price was simply too good to resist adding one to the collection. I know there’s a clue in the name but this one looks like a giant dice (die? Any pedants out there?) except that the numbers haven’t quite been lined up properly – you know – opposite sides don’t add to 7 ... how sad am I that that’s the first thing I spot about this box?!

Turns out that’s vaguely useful ... he said, dropping in a little clue ... I like the way this box opens –totally unique opening mechanism.

Next up is a few boxes resulting from a recent Karakuri Club email announcing some new puzzles... I opted for two of the new ones and a copy of an older design that I hadn’t added to my collection yet.

Byway Secret 2 by Hiroshi Iwahara is not a new puzzle by any measure but it is a classic! I’d had the pleasure of playing with a couple of them in the past, but I thought I needed to have one in my own collection, so given that I was going to be getting a couple of things from the Karakuri folks, I added a copy to my order...

It starts out like a really simple puzzle box with the top sliding open in a couple of moves ... except it’s a lot shallower than you’re expecting it to be and there’s a raised plate on the bottom with some Japanese writing on it... not sure if there’s a clue to the next move in that writing or not, but some closer examination leads to the interesting twist that makes Byway Secret a rather interesting little puzzle box ... and another 10 moves sees the main compartment come open.

 

Ring Box by Hideaki Kawashima is a little gem – one of the new boxes on offer, it’s made of ancient keyaki wood with a lovely green colour to it and it literally looks exactly like a classic little ring box. There’s a little card in the box that helpfully tells you that your goal is to remove the ring ... and that actually is important as you might be tempted into thinking that you’ve finished before you actually have... I was!

While this one looks like a ring box and all the visual clues tell your brain that it should open like a normal ring box – it won’t. (Yip, first thing I tried!) Hunting around you’ll find that in a couple of moves you can open the top and see a ring nestling inside. (Yip, it looks like a traditional ring box in there!) I was tempted to think that I’d finished – until Neil pointed out that the ring was held firmly in place and it wasn’t budging!

Cool ... I like that – little bit of a teaser ... set back to work again and a few more moves and the ring is now released...

I really like this little box – especially the fact that it teases you in the middle like that ... gives you a sniff of victory and then makes you try harder...

The other new puzzle is a fresh design from Akio Kamei called Three Sticks. The web-site’s description explains that the craftsman’s intention was to create a puzzle that looks just like three sticks... and he’s succeeded (!).

These matching sticks in walnut, oak and magnolia have markings branded on one face and they do literally look like three nicely finished sticks ... in fact if it weren’t for the fact that some of them feel a little lighter than you might expect, you’d be tempted to actually believe that they were just a set of sticks.

Going to work on them you soon realise that one is a fairly traditional puzzle box mechanism except for the fact that the seams are wonderfully well disguised ... another is a pretty unusual mechanism – not that tricky but a little surprising and again, you’d be hard-pressed to spot any tell-tale signs of what’s going to happen – even when you’re looking in the right spot! ... and the third one achieves exactly what the craftsman has set out to do – perfectly!

...the third chapter in my latest Karakuri binge is all Wil’s fault! I picked up a Kamei Money Box and a couple of String Boxes by Fumio Tsuburai as I didn’t yet have any of them in my collection and Wil had some spares available for sale.

 

The Money Box is another little gem of a box ... it looks like a rosewood money box with a slot in the top and some experimentation will lead you to believe that the bottom might just be a sliding panel... but nothing you do at this point will get that box open! You will need to make use of it, properly, and completely – and at that point the base will magically slide open – I love the fact that the only way into the box is to use it ... and it will open when it’s good and ready – but not until then.

The Christmas 2011 String Box has a single piece of string with a pair of wooden beads on its ends running through the base of the box – some sort of a locking mechanism steadfastly stops the top from being released until you work out the combination of tugs and moves required to release the latch ...locking it up again is a simple matter of replacing the lid. Neat!

The Christmas 2012 String Box has a pair of brightly coloured cords coming out of the four sides of the base – tugging them in various combinations and orders sometimes gives a different feel ... and learning how to string (sorry!) a series of useful moves together in a combination is the secret to opening this box ... and it’s a lot trickier than the previous year’s String Box ... in fact I happen to know that it kept some real puzzlers at bay for several weeks... so it can’t be that easy! Oh, and locking it back up again requires most of the same moves, in reverse...

OK ... that’s probably enough to confess to at this point, so I won’t mention the latest round of offers from the Karakuri Club ... :-)