What Is The Right Level?

The latest  releases by Aaron Wang and friends

It's been a frustrating week. The surgeons I work with seem to be trying to kill me. They have lined up a whole bunch of absolutely gigantic operations on either enormously obese, incredibly frail and/or very elderly patients. It's not good for my nerves to do a bunch of revision hip replacements for infection followed by a 7 hour long total femur replacement on a 50kg anaemic 86 year old! Following a week like that it was time to write the on call rotas again yesterday. Needless to say I am knackered! As a result, my puzzle solving prowess has reached new lows. I'm rubbish at puzzles at the best of times but with a week like I have just had, I'm worse than usual!

So what do I do with a week like that? I attempt some of the most confusing puzzles I own. Not very bright! Every year at around IPP time, Aaron Wang and his friends in China, club together and release a new batch of disentanglement puzzles. Every year I buy a whole load of them and fail to solve most of them. This year I had hoped for a better result but I'm not entirely certain that will happen. The difference is that Aaron has listened to most of us and has produced a few puzzles that are lower than his usual level 10 difficulty. Also this year there were a bunch more that are made entirely of wire with less enormous lengths of string to get tangled up. I bought 10 - stupid boy.

Love Trick by Mr Wu

I started with a Level 7, Love Trick. It is designed by a new to me designer, Mr Wu and looks like a nice place to start.

Over the years I have solved many puzzles that have the basic double loop and rod pieces in various combinations (for example the Lantern puzzles. There is a nice move sequence to them that can be fun but also confusing if you have to do a lot of them at once.

Doing that well remembered move effectively moves the piece from one section to another and eventually a release occurs. The trick is to work out where the piece needs to be moved to sequentially. This one looks nice and easy because there are only a couple of places the piece can be moved to. I duly moved it from one segment to the next and realised that it's now in an odd and awkward to manipulate position. Maybe I should go back and try a different order? Eventually I realised that the order doesn't matter and I just had to be careful how I hold the puzzle to achieve what I need.

Hooray! I can solve something

This filled me with confidence and I had 2 puzzles to choose from. Aaron himself had designed a fun looking puzzle that was supposed to be level 7 but involved string. I shied away from it and decided to move up a level.

Black Hole by DDK

DDK is a very prolific designer and most of his puzzles are incredibly difficult. I was very gratified to see the Black Hole was a "mere" level 8. It looks almost easy with what I thought was an obvious exit point.

Again, the lack of string really appealed to me. I set to fiddling with it whilst watching TV and found a very nice move almost straight away. That move did change things and made the puzzle look like I needed to aim at a different area than I had first thought. OK let's try something...two pieces in my hands and a little yelp of surprise annoyed Mrs S. 

Gulp! What had I just done? Lesson for you all - DON'T solve complex puzzles whilst watching TV. I had absolutely no idea how the puzzle came apart and then could not reassemble the damed thing. Doh!

Two lovely pieces and no idea how I got them

I have spent several hours (my excuse is that work left me very mentally fatigued) and could not put it back together. Luckily, there is an easy reset method to this due to the size of one of the rings. I have reassembled it using the reset and tried to solve it again. Level 8 seems to be beyond me now - I can no longer take it apart. Is level 8 too difficult for me?

Bronze Tripod by DDK

Whilst trying to think© about the Black Hole, I moved up a level to 9 with the Bronze Tripod also by DDK. This had intrigued me as soon as I had seen it, there looked to be an N-ary component to it (there actually isn't) and it looked to confusingly have two possible exit points.

My quick fiddle when I first took my photos, showed me that there are a few possible starting moves for that shuttle but they quickly get blocked inside a loop with nowhere to go. I was reassure that a friend on FB showed that it was solvable and claimed that it was logical. 

I failed for several days to find the solution to this before I had my first breakthrough. I am not sure why I hadn't tried that particular sequence before but suddenly I had the shuttle in a new and interesting position which would allow me to focus on the other side of the puzzle. Again I got stuck before realising that I could perform an odd reflection move of the shuttle which allowed progression. I started on a new path and before I knew what I was doing, I had two pieces and only the vaguest idea how I had done it.

Oh dear! How had I done this?

There is no simple way to reset this so I was going to have to find the true pathway. The first two moves were pretty easy to remember but after that I was stuck and kept finding the two pieces separated in my hands. I managed to backtrack without even realising how. For some reason, I was unable to find the route that would allow me to transition between sides of the puzzle. I had to put it down for a while to calm my frazzled nerves and then tried again later. This time I actually had a think© and realised that I needed to consider some of the pieces as a group and manipulate them together and then separately. Suddenly I could see the whole solution in front of me and I was able to reset and then dismantle the puzzle with ease.

For a level 9, it is surprisingly just perfect for me. The right amount of thought and discovery intermingled with a frisson of panic at times. Finally, I am able to solve something the correct way.

So what is the right level? Level 7 might be a touch easy. Level 8 might be too hard. Level 9 is just right. Something is not right there but my feeble tired brain can't work out what. Now I really need to work on Black Hole again and see if I can actually understand a level 8 puzzle.

You really should get some of these puzzles from Aaron or from PuzzleMaster - pick carefully because they are not for beginners.