I'm back

I just cannot resist wood!

Hi all! I'm sorry for the short break - I've had a week off work and had plans to spend time with the present Mrs S - day trips, eating out, a little DIY & gardening, some puzzling and getting my office in order. Sounded idyllic didn't it? I thought so too and thats when it all fell to bits! I caught an itty bitty cold and it has absolutely pole-axed me! I have spent the best part of 9 days coughing and sneezing my lungs out and sleeping almost every moment - I haven't touched a puzzle and barely even been on Facebook! I'm not one who really believes in illness (which is awkward when you work in a hospital!) and I seldom let a cold stop me but OMG I think I have had pneumonic plague! Let me say that a combination of very strong pain killers (for tendonitis) - Tramadol, Codeine and Diclofenac plus a Hot Toddy plus a good dose of "Night Nurse" does make for a VERY good sleep - 12 hours lying in exactly the same position all night! Just make sure that position is a comfortable one or something's going to hurt the following day! Even Mrs S who, as a nurse, has no sympathy for anyone apart from those about to lose a limb, felt sorry for me! That is right up until she got it too - now I'm public enemy number 3 (just behind international terrorists and Alex Salmond)!

So before I'm either killed or cured, I thought I would review something for you to prove I'm actually still alive and before Mrs S puts me out of her misery. Some time ago, my friend Jakub at the New Pelikan Workshop emailed me to say that the puzzles he had been working on were about to go on sale. Now, as you've seen over the last few months, I seem to have sold off my organs and bought puzzles instead (maybe that's why I got sick?) so I couldn't afford to buy the whole lot he had and so chose the 3 that looked most interesting to me. Pictured above we have from the left: Space Axis, Tall Joe and Orion.

From the sublime to the ridiculous

Mirror blocks

Boy, I have been so busy recently - work keeps me going, then there's surfing the internet for toys, buying toys, taking photos of the toys, solving those toys, keeping in touch with puzzlers around the world and then we have those amazing but very time-consuming Midlands Puzzle Parties! I attended number 15 yesterday and had an absolute ball! More puzzles were bought, some were solved and I learned NEVER to trust a magician!

Another nemesis!

Laurie Brokenshire (one of the greatest collectors and solvers in the world) was present, as well as the incredibly prolific mathematician cum puzzle designer, Dick Hess and I realised that previous puzzle party attempts to make me look foolish were as nothing compared to the combined efforts of these two amazing gentlemen! They made me into a nodding donkey, doing contortions with my thumbs and having a guessing game on what was the purpose of a plastic thingummy! I have not had such a laugh in a long time - my only consolation was that everyone fell for their pranks. I was also humbled by watching them quickly solve puzzles that I had spent months on and failed - Rox had given me a copy of the Squared Fish puzzle and after year I had singularly failed - it took Dick less than 15 minutes! There are some of my correspondents who think I am an experienced and skilled solver but I am nothing more than a rank amateur compared to them! I did not take a camera so you will need to watch one of the other blogs for that. I've had my little MPP fix of Puzzle boxes so yet again I have no need to buy any myself - Phew cos Mrs S would be very unhappy with me if I started on that route.

We even had some Koala porn!!!

OMG!!!

So I'm left rather late on a Sunday afternoon wondering what to write about and not an awful lot of time. I therefore decided that after a sublime MPP, I would write a few lines about my ridiculous fascination with twisty puzzles and in particular about a few brilliant ones I own or have played with.

It's not a review - its a PREview

Seen this before? Not quite!

On the 29th March 2013 I published a rather sad but also hopeful article about a puzzle that I had obtained from Hunter Palshook. Hunter had taken one of Calvin's 4x4x6 shapeshifting cuboids and pared it down and fused bits together and polished it up until he had made a 2x4x6 cuboid. This is the lowest order version of the "Ultimate shapeshifting" group of cuboids. I have described the classification extensively in my blog post here as well as a printed version in 2 editions of the CFF journal.

The Ultimate shape shifters are twisty puzzles in cuboid form with the general arrangement:

N x (N + E1) x (N + E2) where E1 and E2 are 2 different even numbers

Having 2 different even numbers ensures that it can shapeshift in every direction and it also means that it suffers from the problem of parities - it has both Floppy parities as well as brick parities. The group include the original 3x5x7 and subsequent 4x6x8, 5x7x9 and the incredible 6x8x10! The "simplest" in this group would be the 2x4x6 and when I first received it from Hunter I absolutely loved it!

But the deal all along was that if Calvin was interested in possibly mass-production then my handmade copy would have to go back. In all I owned the original (marked with the HP₁ logo on it) for just under 2 weeks when it had to be returned. During that 15 months, I really missed that little puzzle! Of course I managed to obtain several of it's bigger brethren but there was something magical about it. All of a sudden Calvin made an announcement on the Twisty Puzzles forum that his mass produced version was about to be released.

An Eggcellent puzzle - Much more complex than I first thought!

The Strijbos egg - it's the one on the left!!

Last week I warned the world that Wil Strijbos was going to be releasing a very special new puzzle on an unsuspecting world and oh boy was I right! The first ones have been released and I absolutely MUST write a blog post about it!

People seem to think that working as the "trouble shooter" for Streetwise puzzles (Wil's brand name), I get lots of advance notice of puzzles coming up or even get to play with them early. I'm afraid that is far from true - I hear about them through the same newsletters as everyone else and have to rattle in my order as quickly as possible to avoid losing out! My rôle has simply been to receive emails forwarded from Wil that are asking for help with possibly broken puzzles or sometimes helping people who just cannot solve something.

We have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Egg for a year now, since Wil sent out tantalising photos of the pieces. Everyone had hoped (including Wil) that it would be ready for Easter this year and when Newsletters A-E came out in May after the Easter holiday, we had almost given up hope. But late at night (does that man ever sleep?) an email was sent out that suddenly released on the unsuspecting world the news that "The Egg" was now available. Most of the UK was asleep (including me) and I actually didn't see anything in my usual morning scan of my emails at 6am. Whilst eating breakfast I received an email from my very good friend Shane (famous for The Block and The Circle). Shane and I communicate very frequently about life, families and puzzles and it is always a delight to read his emails - I also hope for news of the upcoming Parallelogram. I opened his email at 06:30 and was horrified to read that Wil's latest newsletter did not appear to have come to me! Quickly rummaging through my Spam folders I was disgusted to see that Google had indiscriminately placed Wil's latest email there! I read through the blurb, gulped very loudly at the price-tag and promptly sent an email hoping that there would be some left. I immediately set up a Gmail rule to ensure his messages are tagged as high priority and then also set up an "If This Then That" (IFTTT) rule to ensure that if ANYTHING came from Wil I would also receive a text message informing me of it asap - do you think this might be the sign of OCD?^* Later on I paid a sum of money to Wil that Mrs S still is not aware of and I don't plan to let her know any time soon! I received my tracking number a day or so later.

^*Let me assure you that my OCD is actually CDO - it is VERY important to put the letters in the correct order!!

In the Newsletter we were provided with the following information:

After 3 prototypes I managed to get ready the EGG in time, at least
before Easter 2015. Still a lot of work to do, to check all the Egg’s
from the inside. I anyway from the outside they all look wonderful and
if you can not solve the EGG, who cares about the inside?
                Mmmmmmm, probably just me :)
 

James Dalgety's Egg

          History of the EGG:

See the picture I took when I visited James Dalgety in December 2011.
The date on the bottom from the EGG says 1986, so it is now at least
28 years ago that I created this EGG. This first creation will be also
in the collection from Jerry Slocum, Dick Hess and in some other col-
lections. Maximum production at that time was less then ten. In the
90tys last century a company tried to produce the EGG. The result at
the end was a broken EGG, too difficult to produce they told me. So
when I saw my EGG again in the collection from James Dalgety I decided
to give it a try.

With this sort of tantalising information, how could I possibly resist?

Wire and String from Mr Strijbos

My last Strijbos delivery

You all know about my habit! I have a man who keeps tempting me away from my money! Yes, Mr Strijbos, that would be you! Recently the update that came out had a few nice bits of metal loveliness and, of course, I had to add that to my collection! The 4 piece jigsaw has been quite a hit at work and the Heart in heart puzzle was a big hit with my wife! Who knows whether I will ever get that one back.

Wil knows about my love of disentanglements and is aware that I seem to have become a bit of an expert - I still feel like a beginner but I do appear to have solved quite a lot of them now and the guys at the Midlands Puzzle Parties often give me new ones to try. Wil finds quite a few new ones during his travels and brings a few really good ones back for us to buy. One of the best I have ever tried was the 2 ring teddy which has stumped many many people - both newbies and experienced puzzlers. It was so good that it has made TWO appearances on this blog - here and here.

Cast Violon

Cast Violon

Yet again I'm late publishing! I'm terribly sorry, but being on call makes it rather hard to concentrate but luckily I am off on the bank holiday Monday and so there's still going to be an update for you. I was planning on discussing the latest heavy metal loveliness from my friend Wil Strijbos but Allard and and Jerry got there first and I very much doubt you want to read three reviews of the same puzzles in a row (especially as they are so simple as puzzles - even if they are truly gorgeous).

Instead, I went out and rummaged around in my drawer containing my stash from Puzzle Master and found something that even the present Mrs S said looked gorgeous when it first arrived - the Cast Violon. This is one of the easier of the Hanayama puzzles which I had seen before at work when one of my friends who I had infected with the bug brought it to show me. At that time I had only played for a short while and gone around in circles for a while despite it being "easy". How easy? Well it is rated as a level 2 on Hanayama's 6 point scale or level 6 (Tricky) on Puzzle Master's scale of 5-10. Usually at this level, I find them fairly trivial but I bought it because of my previous difficulty, my urge to collect them all and also because it is just so beautiful.

It arrived packaged beautifully in the customary Hanayama black box and despite the look of my photo, it was absolutely pristine (my pictures always seem to show up lots of dust and fur - probably because everything I own is now covered in cat fur!) This puzzle is not new, it was originally patented in the US in 1965, having been created by Joseph L. Litle. The Hanayama version was reconstructed by Nob Yoshigahara after playing with a wooden copy built by his close, but now deceased friend, Tadao Muroi. Nob changed the proportions considerably from the original plan and made it look more like a violin and hence the name. It is made from a cast metal and anodised a lovely reddish colour making it look almost like copper (I hope it won't go green with time).

All the reviews on the product page are 4 stars or above and it has been very well received. Gabriel reviewed it here and felt that it deserved a higher difficulty rating. Neil's review was positive and included a video to show how it moved.

No solution is provided and I very much doubt that you will need it but should you collect the solutions then it can be downloaded from Puzzle Master at this page.

These cubes are Mine's (Or are they?)

The second post of the day!!! I just had to get this off my chest - it has taken me a VERY long time to solve these puzzles!

Mine's Cubes?

None of these puzzles are new - in fact I have had them for an embarrassingly long time! This collection of cubes/interlocking solids have an interesting history. They were bought at separate times and from different craftsmen yet share a common theme. From left to right we have Lock-Y-Cube, Disjointed/Accordion Cube and Lock-N-Cube.

All three of these were designed by the incredibly prolific Mineyuki Uyematsu aka Mine. The middle one was also independently designed by a newcomer to the puzzle design world, Ken Irvine, who arrived like a hurricane at the Washington DC IPP in 2012 and caused a real storm (sic!) when one of the cubes that he released to the world was absolutely identical to one produced by Mine. After the furore died down and the community realised that they really had been designed independently (after all, calculus was discovered by 2 great mathematicians simultaneously), they began to appear on the market. Mine had called his the Disjointed cube and Ken named it the Accordion cube - why these names? Because this happens:

Just a cube?

Disjointed/Stretched out

This particular version was made by the amazing Eric Fuller and sold in Feb 2012 - he made it from beautiful woods (Holly, Canarywood, Sapele, Zebrawood and Walnut). The interesting thing about it that makes it fun is that all five pieces move along the same axis, yet nothing seems to want to come apart. This is a very devious and fun design that stumped me for quite a while - it requires you to notice something rather unexpected before a piece comes loose. After that, it all comes to pieces. Reassembly is not too hard as long as you remember the order and position - there are several ways a couple of pieces would appear to go but only one is correct.

Eric makes such gorgeous puzzles!!

A unique challenge from Greece

There's going to be two posts this weekend! Watch out for the next one later today!!!

The 5x5x4 Floppy iCube

I watched in amazement when SuperAntonioVivaldi showed an entirely new class of cuboid - the Floppy iCube. The original icube was mass produced by Calvin as the 3x3x4 iCube and then my friend Dan (CrazyBadCuber) made the 4x4x5 version:

I got lost in the catacombs as well as the KCube!

Catacombs Plus

After last week's mammoth post (which did not seem to be particularly avidly received - do you all really dislike twisties so much?) which must have taken me a total of 8 hours to photograph and write, I am back to a much shorter one on a puzzle you will all appreciate.

The Chinese rings puzzle is a classic - it is one of the "must have" puzzles that all puzzlers should own - partly because it has been around for so more than 2000 years and also because it is such a nice fun one to solve! I have already written about the one I got from Livewire puzzles some time ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. But it only had 6 rings on it and really didn't take very long - let's say it was a beginner version. I also have a lovely heavy metal version which was sent to me by a very kind friend from the US. This version is made of steel by Tucker Jones and is called the Patience puzzle - it is absolutely stunning but not high enough level. I had seen on YouTube and also on Goetz' wonderfully informative site that there were variants that had more rings and hence, many more moves to solve.

I regularly browse through the Puzzle Master wire puzzle section to see if they have anything new for me and realised they had a Chinese ring puzzle so I ordered the Puzzle Master own brand version in my last order so that I could have a "grown up" version to try! The Catacombs plus is a beautifully made version with not just 1 or 2 extra rings - it has 10! For this reason it has been rated as a level 10 (Mind Boggling) on their difficulty scale and despite the fact that it is just based on a binary version of Gray code, it is a real challenge and certainly not something to do when you might be interrupted and sent off to do other chores. It arrived in Puzzle Master's standard clamshell packaging (albeit a much longer one than usual) and the only instructions are to remove the handle. It is beautifully made with really nice thick anodised wire, a good quality handle which makes holding it for prolonged periods much easier than the ones with wires only and, as you can see, has 10 rings on it! Dimensions are 3 x 20.5 cm.

No solution is given and hopefully you won't need one but if required the solution method for an easy version can be downloaded from here.

Six faces aren't tough enough? Try these, you minx!

That's a lot of dodecahedra! (25 in all)
Yes! The cubes really ARE dodecahedra.

I'm very late - because "She who MUST be obeyed" ordered me to spend the entire weekend and bank holiday doing DIY and gardening. Unfortunately I am quite good at DIY and so she keeps forcing me to do more. When I mentioned that I had a blogpost to write she gave me a really dirty look and I began to smell burning before suddenly realising that my forehead was on fire! She now can use the laser burning stare without me even being able to tell - no running and hiding until it's too late!

I think it might be time for another little attempt at encouraging you to have a go at twisty puzzles. I WILL keep trying you know! They are just so good that everyone should at least have a try and spend a while learning either the beginners solution or the Ultimate solution.

This is quite a long post (OK, it's a very long post) but I will show you lots of interesting possibilities with links to where you can get them. There is a whole new world out there for all puzzlers to try. In N America I would suggest using Puzzle Master, who have a really good stock of twisty puzzles and in Asia I have begun to use Cubezz.com - slightly more limited stock but amazing prices!

So having managed a cube (at least a 3x3 and maybe for the very adventurous the 4x4 too with all it's interesting little parities), what if you'd like to step it up a little? Add a little diversity of shape, give yourself some more movement, or even just vary the collection. After all, puzzlers are very interested in shapes and surely you cannot be satisfied until you have representatives of all the platonic solids!

All 5 platonic solids - all are face turning

In my "advice to beginners post" I suggest that the next steps after a simple cube is to move to different turning mechanisms or to move to shape modifications to skew your vision. But an alternative approach would be to move to one or all of the different shapes shown above. BUT if you would rather keep your path narrow or you have already done the cube and alternative mechanisms then how about falling down the deep spiral of doom into the dodecahedra? It's not just one puzzle for you - it's a whole family of them!

The Megaminx

Ah! This takes me back! It was amongst the first "different" twisties I bought several years ago. I still take it out to play even now. This is the very basic dodecahedral twisty and was designed many years ago by many people independently - Ben Halpern from USA, Boris Horvat from Yugoslavia, Barry Lockwood from UK and Miklós Kristóf  from Hungary, and Kersten Meier (Germany) sent plans in early 1981. I have heard that Dr Christoph Bandelow from Germany obtained  patents. The Hungarian version is notable as actually being in production. Shortly thereafter Uwe Meffert (one of the forefathers of twisty puzzling)  bought the rights to the Halpern and Meier design and marketed it as the Megaminx.

It has 12 face center pieces which are fixed, 20 corner pieces with 3 orientations, and 30 edge pieces with 2 orientations each! The theoretical maximum number of places is therefore 30! x 20! x 2³⁰ x 3²⁰ positions but not all can be reached because only even permutations of edges are possible (2), only even permutations of corners are possible (2), only an even number of flipped edges are possible (2) and the total twist of the corners is fixed (3)
This leaves:

positions

or
100,669,616,553,523,347,122,516,032,313,645,505,168,688,116,411,019,768,627,200,000,000,000
or
1.01 x 10⁶⁸ positions or 101 Unvigintillion/Undecillion.

Now hold on, hold on! Don't run away now! Thats all the maths I'll give! The numbers sound horrific but then they already do for the plain old Rubik cube and you know that the cube is easy. In fact the simple 3x3 face turning dodecahedron can be solved with EXACTLY the same method as the cube! Only a very minor alteration is needed for the megaminx. So it is really easy!! You can make it a bit tougher by giving the centre pieces an orientation - using Pochmann stickers for it from Oliver's stickers.

Still a megaminx - but now a "super" version

So having decided that you love the idea of 12 faces, where could you go next? Well the sky is the limit! The first thing most puzzlers look for is to buy bigger (or smaller puzzles) and I was no exception. Having mastered the 3x3 equivalent, I went for a 2x2 version (called the flowerminx or Kilominx) and originally designed by David Litwin from Twisty Puzzles and manufactured by Uwe Meffert. I also went for a 4x4 version known as the Master Kilominx by David Gugl and produced by MF8 which, like the 4x4 cube has a rather fun parity but also has a very interesting method of solving which does not produce parities and involves 2x2 block building.

2x2 - Flowerminx	4x4 - Master Kilominx
How much pain do you want?

This series continues with Gigaminx (5 layers), Teraminx (7 layers) and even Petaminx (9 layers), all mass produced and available now (if you really want the biggest twisty puzzle there is then get this one and the price from cubezz.com is amazing). If you are loaded down with an excess of cash or have a huge urge to collect a series, then a six layer (Elite kilominx) was designed by Grégoire Pfennig and made by Shapeways and may someday be available at auction. I don't have any of these as yet because I keep getting sidetracked by other toys! and to be honest they don't really add much to the challenge (just as a 7x7 cube is not really harder than a 5x5 once you know the basic process).