Happy Birthday Frank!

One of the really great things about almost sharing a birthday with another puzzler is that you have a brilliant excuse to do puzzling stuff about the same time every year… and so it is that we’ve come to gather oop north at Frank’s for a Northern Puzzle Party at the end of September / start of October each year.

A few weeks back was the designated weekend so a bunch of us trekked north, and some locals rocked up, and Louis and Wil joined us from The Netherlands… our first actual in-person puzzle party in absolute blimming ages… it would be a massive understatement to say that I was looking forward to it!

I was one of the last to arrive – the Dutch crew had flown in the day before and pretty much everyone else had clearly left earlier than I did to get there and get some puzzling on… when I arrived Frank began plying me with caffeine and I set about saying hello to folks I literally haven’t seen in person for more than a year and a half – saying hello and shaking a hand felt reassuringly normal… it didn’t take long to fall into our old habits of handing out puzzles we thought people might enjoy and then “encouraging” (or more accurately: goading) them into solving it. Oh, and there might have been a bit of banter around as well…

Ali and Steve gave Frank and I each a 3D printed Happiness cube #27 – on the grounds that together it produced our age… Steve explained that whenever they order their filament they always get a small sample of some other colours and they’ve been storing up these samples for a while now and that’s what they’d used to print our splendidly colourful Cubes of Happiness – so it hadn’t actually cost them anything… however I suspect that rather discounts the many hours of endlessly swapping filaments they (Ali?) must have gone through… in the end I think there might be a shed-load of effort that went into producing those cubes… thanks guys! I really appreciate the care and effort that went into that!

They also gave both of us an airhorn… it’s a long story. :-)

I made sure that I thrust a copy of Croissant at a few people after it had given me more than a good run for my money… and the smiles eventually cracked when they found the right way to get everything in without bending anything along the way…

Louis gave me a copy of Siebenstein’s Laby Box – a cube-ish box with four sliders around the edges and a central core with four mazes for the sliders to navigate through… only the mazes themselves are hidden inside the box until you start to extract the central core. Some strategy is helpful here or you’ll find yourself having to retrace large portions of your steps, which can be tiresome.

I’d taken the set of Holonomy Mazes along in case someone was interested in having a whizz around them… Steve spent a while pretending he couldn’t solve them and then did – just like that!

Frank gave me a copy of a Kumiki easel that our friend Lixy has commissioned – it’s a really neat little construction that’s just the right size to display a bunch of the Asobidea puzzling postcards. The pieces are neatly machined and they go together beautifully, holding together rather nicely and forming a reasonably serviceable little display easel.

Lunch was a massive affair, dwarfed only, as it turned out, by dinner, as Jo had laid on an incredible spread for us…

Ethel had brought over several crates of puzzles for re-homing and several of us had a good old rake through them to find some new treasures. Amy picked out quite a few lovely little puzzles and I managed to buy a copy of Stew Coffin’s Grizzly Burr which I’d been after for a little while now. The best bits from those crates will soon be finding their way to a puzzle auction site near you, courtesy of Steve… good man!

Mike had a bash at Jigsaw 16 – not bothering with the stated goal of “merely” putting the sixteen jigsaw pieces into the frame – he opted for the potential challenge of assembling a complete square of those pieces even though none of us knew if it was even possible… and he spent quite a while coming up with almost-solutions, but persevered until he had produced a perfect little blue square, impressing all those around him… now we know it’s possible – not easy, but possible!

I’d taken my copy of Kamei’s Hot Miso Soup along in the hope of getting “someone” to open it for me… I’d had it open once or twice, but latterly I couldn’t get one of the early moves to work properly so I reckoned one of the box-savants would get it opened for me in no time. Sadly both Louis and Oli gave it back to me solidly locked and we decided it would probably need to go on a little trip for some repairs… and then when I got home the weirdest thing happened – I opened it! I suspect that the general encouragement the lads had given it over the weekend had somehow loosened it up to the extent that when I gave it one last try before sending it off to Japan, it magically opened… consistently – so thanks chaps!

Wil put me out of my misery on Lutz – I’d been struggling for ages and I’d quite literally convinced myself this one really was impossible… only for Wil to show me it wasn't… he’s a pretty decent puzzlist is Wil!

Mike had asked me to bring along a One-Piece Packing Puzzle or two… so I took him the original Nightingale exchange version (aka Clive Box), Eric’s original Cubic Dissection version, Eric’s Improved version and a copy of Simon’s One-Piece Packing Puzzle – Mike was happy for a short while. (It didn’t take him long to work through them all!)

Several of us stayed over at Frank’s while some spent the night in a local Airbnb. Frank was up bright and early and cooked us all blueberry pancakes with his own fair hands… serious treat! After breakfast we tidied up all of our puzzles and popped everything back in the cars and then headed off to Preston for a couple of actual in-person escape rooms – again, something most of us haven’t done in eighteen months. In spite of our lack of match-fitness both teams managed to escape their respective rooms with plenty of time to spare… we celebrated with some leftover sandwiches from the day before (still delicious!) before we headed off down the motorways to various points south, with my sat-nav seriously earning it’s keep routing me off the main motorways a couple of times to skip over some serious snarl-ups.

Thanks Frank (and Jo!) for a brilliant weekend – and happy birthday mate!

Brass Monkey 5

The Two Brass Monkeys have literally just released their latest creation into the wild and I feel the need to write about it…

They sent me a pre-release copy a couple of weeks ago and after waiting patiently until I’d finished up at work, headed home (seems weird to actually be able to say that!) and worked through the usual evening regime of penance on the exercise bike and dinner, I was finally able to sit down and have a wee puzzle.

BM5 looks virtually just like every other BM in the series – with just the slightest little detailing around the ends enabling you to tell them apart from the others – a hole and a ring mark out BM5… the rest looks pretty much just like every other one: it’s a standard six-piece cylindrical burr.

…but if they were all alike, we’d have stopped buying them after about BM3… just to be sure, right?!

So far, every one of them has been pretty darn unique, so it’s sensible to start out with high expectations… treat it with respect, don’t let yourself get lulled into a false sense of security at having solved the first four in the series (you have, haven't you?)… approach it with some reverence… it won’t disappoint.

Anyway, back to the story of my solve… I tried all the usual things one tries on a burr – heck, I even tried some of the more unusual things one might try – I’ve learnt lessons from the first four BMs after all.

None of that seems to do anything useful whatsoever…

BM5 is a very worthy successor – and I suspect it will be the most surprising puzzle that you solve this year. (I’m assuming you do solve it this year… although I suspect that it might take some folks a little while before they stumble onto the best way of solving this particular little conundrum.)

I will tell you that when I did solve it I felt the need to hop straight onto a video call with the monkeys to share my amazement /amusement / gob-smack-ed-ness – this little puzzle has given me the biggest laugh out loud moment that I can remember - equal parts “A-Ha” and “A-Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

If it doesn’t delight and surprise you, please check your pulse…

 

Holonomy Mazes

Out...

Henry Segerman has been designing puzzles and wonderfully interesting 3D-printed mathematical structures for a while now. He recently shared a video of a new sort of maze he’d designed which uses an interesting property of moving something around the surface of a three-dimensional ball-like object: moving around in a closed loop on the surface changes the orientation of that thing relative to the ball… which is interesting, as Laurie always used to say. That property is called holonomy and Henry’s mazes use that property to make traversing the maze depend not only on where you are, but how you got there…

The first two mazes he published on Shapeways were based on octahedral geometry projected onto a ball. The shuttle, which he calls a rook based on the shape of its foot that engages in the maze, starts in one place in a forced orientation thanks to the little projections either side of the insertion hole… the object is to return to that starting point in a different orientation so that one of the rook’s arms is trapped under the overhanging lip on one of those starting projections.

Start

Travelling around the surface, every time you take the rook around one of the triangles on the surface, it rotates 90 degrees – which is helpful, because there are a bunch of pegs on the surface of the balls that will stop your progress depending on which way round the rook is positioned…  so your task is to find a permissible route around the ball that takes you back to the start, but gets you there in the right orientation – see, it doesn’t just matter where you end up, but it also depends on how you got there… nice! [Henry does a much better job of explaining all that than I do - watch his videos!]

Right – that’s the theory – how do they play?

Home

The first two Holonomy Mazes Henry released were octahedral, as I’ve said - that gives us 24 possible nodes if we were to graph them and definitely provide a non-trivial little puzzle. There isn’t all that much space on the ball, so you never really feel like you’re lost – it’s always just a case of working out which routes are currently available and whether you want to go straight toward your goal of via a detour or three to change orientations.

The mazes and rooks are cleverly designed to allow only the valid moves and after an initial bit of playing any roughness on the prints is smoothed away… I quite like these little mazes because despite having such a small physical area, they provide a neat little challenge.

A few weeks later Henry presented his Dodecahedral Holonomy Mazes so I had to give those a bash as well. This time you have 120 nodes potentially available (before the pegs begin to limit that space) and a circuit of any one of the pentagons will translate the rook by 60 degrees this time… where the smaller mazes feel like they should be simple, the dodecahedral ones feels a lot more complex, at least to me they do – and watching the videos where Henry describes the process of deciding which mazes would be interesting, I’m not surprised – he’s deliberately chosen layouts that have lots of spaces where a puzzler can easily run around in circles for a while (yup, I’ve got the t-shirt!) and also have some bottlenecks in the middle so if you don’t pick the right path at the right time, you’re doomed to wander around in those almost-closed loops.

These puzzles are not only fun to play, they’re also interesting for how make use of such a relatively small space while producing interesting, non-trivial puzzles. 

 

Nuts N' Bolts

A couple of weeks ago I spotted an announcement from Phil Wigfield on Discord that he’d be releasing a new brass bolt puzzle in a couple of weeks’ time, so I made a mental note to keep an eye out for it on his Etsy shop. 

A couple of days later a package arrived from Walsall out of the blue – which surprised me at first, but the note inside really blew me away. It was a letter from Phil gifting me a copy of his latest as-yet-unavailable puzzle Nuts N’ Bolts. Thank you, Phil!

I was quite keen to play so I opened up the customary little wooden box and lifted the little contraption off its satiny pillow – it’s an interesting looking little beastie – a pair of parallel bolts courtesy of a pair of fat conjoined nuts seem to be held together by a single nut and bolt combo that pierces the whole lot of them… and trapped far out of reach is a pair of washers that you’re aiming to remove.

Seems obvious that you need to remove the crossing bolt and then you’ll be able to remove the big bolts and Robert’s your mother’s brother. Only it’s not quite a simple as that… you might find the first step works pretty much as you’d hope, only from then on things get “interesting” – and by “interesting”, I mean all progress ceases!

Definitely time to Think(c).

There is a beautifully elegant solution that leaves you with a pair of freed washers and a nice smile on the face.

At this point you’ll know exactly what he’s done to create this little piece of glorious engineering, but I defy you to find the traces of his handiwork… he’s gone to a lot of trouble to keep things unseen that should not be seen… it is beautifully made, and a lovely puzzle – and if I hadn’t just been given a copy, I’d be queuing up for a copy when they’re released...probably tomorrow. ;-) 

You're welcome!