One...Three...Two...Solved!

Galaxy III

Galaxy III by DDK

Yes, from the title of the post you can tell that I am neither a mathematician nor could I ever be a scrub nurse (who needs to count to 5 preferably in the right order). This puzzle, Galaxy III designed by the amazing DDK and made by Mr Gao which I got from Aaron's recent release has this very strange progression to solution.

I have had another bad week and failed to solve everything in sight. I have been moving from wire puzzle to wire puzzle in the hope that I will have another Aha! moment but everything has failed on me. I was then mortified when my facebook friend, Yang Qingliang, showed off that they had solved the Galaxy III and had revealed to the world that they felt it was pretty easy needing only 4 moves. OMG! I am so rubbish at puzzles.

Aaron had rated the Galaxy III as only a level 7 and I had picked it up first in the hope that I would have something solved easily to boost my confidence. I had completely failed over the next few hours and eventually put it down to try others. It does look relatively simple with a shuttle straddling one of the wires on the outer layer of the spiral. The shuttle can be threaded right through from that outer wire to the centre with no obstructions but at first glance there isn't an obvious exit point and what you might think is a possible exit is blocked by the pair of oval rings across several layers. Winding round and around in circles is satisfying for a minute or so but when you get nowhere it loses its entertainment value quickly. 

Having been shamed I went back to it last night and this morning and had one of my very rare thoughts. I remembered back to almost the very beginning of my puzzling journey when I spent what was then a rather large sum of money on the entire Livewire puzzle collection. One of my absolute favourites from them was the Pyramid scheme which had a nice clever trick to it to find a rather counter-intuitive but very clever solution.

Pyramid scheme from Livewire puzzles

You can see the similarities of the spiral and the blockage ring with the shuttle on one wire. Once I had recalled the interesting idea that solved this one, I tried that move on the Galaxy III and suddenly went from one wire in the shuttle to three. That is fun and hopefully a progression. Next I moved it around a bit and before I knew it, did the same sort of move again from a different position and had 2 wires trapped. WTF?

1...3...2 was an odd sort of progression but I could now see an exit in exactly the same way I found the exit for the Pyramid scheme. Suddenly I had my shout of success and I didn't feel like quite such an eejit and more - I am not thinking about the fact that it is only a simple level 7! I will take the win.

Hooray

Having taken the photo, it was time to reassemble. I knew the type of moves that were required. It wasn't plain sailing but after a bit of fiddling about I managed it. It is quite fun to watch the non-obvious moves achieve results that don't seem like they should be possible - it's lovely in the same way that the original Livewire puzzle caused so much delight. I will be torturing colleagues with this one this week. At level 7 it might be solvable by someone.

Thank you Aaron for the torture!