Think Diagonally and Other Directions

Diagonal Twins by Yasuhiro Hashimoto produced by Mine
Note that this photo only shows the pieces as previously displayed by Mine

When the Diagonal Twins by Yasuriro-san was awarded the Puzzler's award AND a Jury honourable mention award at the IPP design competition last year, many of us waited with baited breath for Mine to complete his production run and post them out. It took him quite a while but we were all happy to wait to get hold of something truly special. I haven't had much time to play with it until fairly recently but have taken it to work a few times and let some colleagues loose on it.

There must be something quite compelling about such a simple puzzle because everyone I showed it to was unable to resist playing with it. Having 2 pairs of identical twin pieces made from lovely wood and a simple box with a slightly restricted opening makes it look like it should be an easy thing to solve. I watched everyone play and fail over many many attempts and was delighted by their frustration. Despite watching them play, I only had a little time to try myself. 

The puzzle is very reminiscent of the Pin Block Case by Hajime Katsumoto (produced by Eric Fuller) which I reviewed way back in 2018. It also has 4 pieces to be inserted into a simple cubic box through a restricted opening and requires a very beautiful sequence of moves to solve.

Pin Block Case by Hajime Katsumoto

Over the last week I have been working on this myself and trying my usual attempts outside the box. The pieces fit together in only a linmtied number of ways and so the issue is getting the conformation to go inside. This is much easier to talk about than actually do. I tried to be systematic and find an assembly that I would be able to disassemble through a limited opening and that is where I got stuck. There seem to be a lot of ways it should be possible but the curved sides of the opening prevent almost everything that i wanted to do. Damn! I really struggled. 

I even continued in desperation this morning to try and solve it. If I wasn't successful then I would have nothing interesting to write about for the blog. The pressure was on! Man! This one was tough. After about 1½ hours of muttering to myself (luckily Mrs S was elsewhere) I finally had my Aha! moment and the pieces finally slid home. I can now see why this won the prize - it is such a simple idea and yet so tremendously beautiful in its execution. I cannot show you the packed puzzle as it would give too much away but I have to agree with the Jury and all the puzzlers at last years IPP - it's amazing. If you get a chance to buy a copy or even just play with a copy then you should definitely jump at it. I will be bringing this and the Pin Block Case to work for a while to torture my friends with.

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Jigsaw P4z by Mine
Same photo as released by Mine himself so as not to give too much away

I also challenged my work colleagues with another lovely little simple design by Mine. This is a simple 4 piece jigsaw with a square framed tray to assemble them inside. It arrives with the Jigsaw already pre-assembled so what is the challenge? Take the puzzle pieces and assemble them so that all the nobbles and holes are paired but make it so that the puzzle cannot move in the tray. It's really not terribly tough but needs a little thought and leaves both beginners and experienced puzzlers with a satisfied Aha! moment when they work it out. Everyone I gave it to solved it in about 5-10 minutes and they were all very pleased with themselves. 

Thank you Mine, for the opportunity to play with these. I still have a whole bunch of extras that I haven't gotten around to yet. Most are tray type packing puzzles so I expect them to take me many years!

Sometimes Burrtools Is A Godsend...

And Often Not!

P3C by Yasuhiro Hashimoto (produced by Mine)

Every 6 months or so, Mine offers up a bunch of puzzles that his Japanese friends design (many of them appeared in the IPP design competition). The P3C arrived and I set to work on it shortly after it arrived. Needless to say, I failed! Again and again and again! It got to the point that I put it in my work bag and would get it out every few weeks to try and yes, you guessed it, fail again! 

There's another one that shares that fate - the Turning Quarter Hole has been in my bag for 5 years and still not been solved! OMG! I received it in March 2022 and still not solved it. Maybe I need to give up this puzzling hobby?

Interestingly, these two puzzles share the same 6 tetromino pieces and same aim of packing them in a box that measure 24 voxels in volume but have different dimensions (the P3C has a box that is 2x3x4 and the  Turning Quarter Hole box measures 4x4x2 with all 4 corners blocked by diagonal walls. Obviously the entry holes are different and the latter puzzle has a top lid that is captive but can rotate freely. 

These two have accompanied for such a long time that I eventually got desperate with one of them and decided to let Burrtools do a comprehensive analysis for me. I was pretty certain that it would not be able to solve it for me. The box has a nice 2x2 hole in the top and there are two single voxel holes in the bottom. I did wonder whether the solution would be linear with pieces needing to drop through the holes to allow others to pass over the top. But... after nearly 2 years of trying I was fairly certain that the holes in the bottom were just finger holes to allow manipulation and that some kind of rotation might be needed. 

I duly entered the puzzle entirely into that wonderful programme by Andreas and, as expected, no solution popped out. It did give me all the possible ways that the 6 tetrominoes could be assembled in the box. "All" that was needed was to try them all out systematically and work out which could be disassembled a reasonable amount through the hole in the top until there was room for other pieces to achieve any required rotations. BT found that there were 28 possible assembles and I started at number one. It didn't take much to work out that all but 3 of them were absolutely impossible as solutions. After this, I tried to be systematic on them and skipped past the solution for several hours. It was right in front of me but I couldn't see it! Those holes are not just finger holes - once you realise that there are a whole lot more possible moves to think about. I had my Aha! moment and finally one of Mine's creations can be put away. Yes, Burrtools to the rescue yet again.

I am not going to show the final packed solution because that is not allowed with these puzzles from Mine. I don't think he has any left but I am sure that you could find the shapes and print your own if you were allowed a 3D printer in your house. Unlike me who daren't even think about it.

I still have the Turning Quarter Hole puzzle accompanying me everywhere and I don't think that BT will help. 

Actually, whilst I am focussing on Mine's puzzles that are always with me there is an even "simpler" design of Koichi Miura's produced by Mine, the Chiral 2&2 which has also completely stumped me because rotations are going to be needed and BT won't help me:

Chiral 2&2 by Koichi Miura

This one has just 4 tetrominoes to be placed in a 3x3x2 box - yes, there are 4 spare voxels free inside so it should be easy peasy - but not for me. I have had this one and gotten absolutely nowhere. Sigh!

Minima Imposter currently available from NothingYetDesigns

Finally, Tye Stahly sent me another Minima puzzle - this one, designed by Kyle Waszak and Ryan Sinatra, shares the 2x2x3 cavity of the usual Miinima box but has a slide on lid.  As soon as I tipped the pieces out, something didn't look right. I had to put my maths head on and calculate that 2x2x3 equals 12 voxels. Then I counted on the digits of two hands and then a foot (having taken my shoes and socks off) there were 12⅓ voxels on the pieces to be packed. Huh! Well, that's odd. Is there a hidden dimension or a portal to somewhere else? I quickly made two vital discoveries but they didn't seem to help with this puzzles at all. BT definitely wasn't going to help with this one! 

Damn you Tye! Is this another one that will be traveling with me for years to come? Sob!

If you want to try and succeed where I failed then it is still available from NothingYetDesigns.

Weaving For Years!

Weaving from Aaron Wang

A very short post today - I have been working yet again this weekend and had very little time for puzzling and no Morbidity and Mortality meetings to ignore whilst playing with my toys! 🤣

Every year Aaron Wang produces a whole bunch of new disentanglement puzzles for sale from various genius designers. He sends out an email with his upcoming catalogue additions to his adoring customers and also posts the list on Facebook for people to choose from. This year he has a huge batch and I have already made my selection (don't tell Mrs S!) He only really produces puzzles of level 9 and higher and most are 10 or 10+ which means terrifyingly difficult. I have collected dozens (if not hundreds) of his creations over the years and there are 3 very large boxes of them in my garage with the ones that I have solved and 2 boxes in a wardrobe in the house of those I have so far failed to solve. Many of his puzzles involve string which means huge complexity and the ability to create tangled knotted catastrophes. More recently he has been using a lobster claw to allow emergency release of the catastrophe but there are a good few that don't have it and these frighten me to death! One of these is the Weaving puzzle signed by the incredible DDK and made in very very limited numbers by Aaron. In fact, as far as I know there may be only 2 or 3 copies in existence. I received one as a gift within my 2022 purchase.

Why did he not mass produce it? Some of the puzzles are so horrendous to make that he only makes a very small batch. That wasn't the reason this time. Aaron only made a few because he felt it was too simple a puzzle to put out on sale. OMG!

I have had this in one of my trays of puzzles to be solved for nearly 3 years and have picked it up many many times since I got it and have singularly failed and scared myself to death on a number of occasions. It consists of a single loop of string (not very long) and a ball to prevent the loop just being fed through all the oval metal rings. It is woven through a complex metal grill that looks rather like a radiator. The short length of the string should be reassuring BUT the lack of a lobster claw release mechanism is scary. I was also rather bamboozled by the way the string is woven through the centre of the grill completely but the outer wires were split on either side. On multiple occasions I tried various approaches to the disentanglement and began to get caught up in a knot or found myself running out of length. Despite the claimed "excessive simplicity" of the puzzle, I managed to completely fail for a very long time. I refused to put it away in my wardrobe and give up - if Aaron said it was easy, then there must be something to it that I should be able to find. I persevered...

During the meeting last week, having solved the packing puzzles first and feeling that I was on a roll, I picked up the Weaving puzzle yet again. As usual, I had no recollection of anything I had tried before and just started afresh. What if I do this??? Oooh! that's interesting. Suddenly, I was weaving away and not creating a knot. After 16 moves I had a rather nice interesting configuration and then another 18 moves I suddenly had 2 pieces of puzzle and a mystifies expression on my face. Why had it taken nearly 3 years? Aaron was right, it was a lot simpler than his usual level but, I have to say, no less delightful for that. 

Finally!
Now I need to put it back together again

Returning it to the start position did cause a little difficulty as I could not recall what I had done at the midpoint of the solve but I did manage it after an extra ½ hour of swearing under my breath! Yay! I can finally put another puzzle away in the wire puzzle collection box in the garage.

Thank you Aaron for yet another fabulous challenge - I am looking forward to my selection of puzzles from the new set. I am sure that I am not the only one but I think it would be good if you would consider making a few slightly simpler puzzles for sale. Not all of us are the disentanglement genius that you and your designing geniuses are.

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Bucolic Cube

About 6 months ago I received some correspondence from a puzzler who suggested that I might want to have a look at the Bucolic cube. It was designed by Yasuhiro Hashimoto and entered into the 2013 IPP design competition in Narita, Japan where it won a "Top ten vote getters award". I had taken a note of this one to be either purchased or made in the future and this week managed to have a play.

What stimulated me to try it now when I had so little time to play? Well, Mrs S has decided that painting and decorating needs to be done in the house as it has been quite a long time since it was last done. Luckily for me, she does not want me to do the painting and decorating - she has another man who comes in to do it. My job is to go out and work my arse off to pay for the other man's services. During the process of clearing a couple of the rooms, I was handed my compartmented box with my fight cubes in them and was told that the box needed to be put away somewhere not cluttering the house. I had completely forgotten that I had them and this jogged my memory to go back and create the Bucolic cube and see what all the fuss was about.

The puzzle consists of 3 identical shapes to be assembled into a 3x3x3 shape - there will be 6 holes in the structure which should make it simpler but actually made it harder for me because I was not creating a complete face and they did not properly interlock. This meant that there were a lot more possible orientations of the pieces alongside each other. After a whole evening of playing with it, I came to the same conclusion as my corespondent and the IPP members that this puzzle was a good one - a very VERY good one.

It took me a good few hours!

If you don't have the Fight cubes then this should be easy to 3D print or you could buy it from PuzzleMaster here or from PuzzleGuy here. This is well worth getting your hands on - it is significantly more challenging than it looks.

Did I Pack My Dowels Properly?

Karakuri Packing by Yasuhiro Hashimoto

During my week off a couple of weeks ago, I was "forced" to construct and mount a bunch of new Billy bookcases with doors in my second puzzle room. Whilst this is a wonderful thing and I WILL be forever grateful to the present wife for allowing/forcing this on me. But...it did mean that the week of leave was filled with DIY and chores and gardening (plus a little private practice which helps me pay for my rather expensive addiction) and I did not get to do much puzzling and did not manage to generate a nice cushion of solved toys to write about.

Watching this is like watching paint dry!

The first day back at work did give me a little time (actually quite a lot of time) to try and get something in the bag for the blog. That day was a vascular list to be done down in the bowels of the hospital (no sunlight, cold and with no prospect of a break or early release. The case was a very elderly frail lady with a rather large aortic aneurysm to be repaired endovascularly using a rather complex multi-branched fenestrated graft. Now, I know that you don't really want to know about that but it helps explain the very depths of my boredom. I am a bit of an excitement freak - I like big juicy and bloody operations that require me to concentrate and keep resuscitating as well as anaesthetising. I do a lot of large open vascular operations, big spinal operations (including scoliosis repair) and lots of revision arthroplasty which tends to prevent not only boredom but also puzzling. That fateful Monday, I discovered (again) that absolutely NOTHING interesting happens during a FEVAR! Nothing happened of any interest to me (apart from intermittent requests to stop the patient breathing for a minute at a time) for over 7½ hours. When you do your very first one it is moderately interesting but now after a decade of doing them, I have lost the ability to watch them moving a wire back and forth on an Xray screen for hours at a time. I only have a tiny mind according to "she who frightens the bejeezus out of everyone" and that tiny mind had left the building about 4 hours in. It was puzzling time!

In my bag there are always toys just in case. Sometimes it is to torture colleagues , sometimes to torture med students whilst I do a chore that can't involve them and I'm always hopeful that I might get a little time to play myself. The Karakuri packing puzzle from Yasuhiro-san had been waiting my attention for months. Allard had absolutely loved it and others I had met at the MPP had also said that it was fabulous. That Monday was my time and the pressure was on - I had to solve it before I lost my mind completely and also because the delightful Libby was watching me as I worked on it and asking rather pertinent questions. I couldn't allow myself to fail under Libby's gaze!

The Karakuri packing puzzle had won a Jury Honourable Mention award at the 2023 IPP design competition and I really had to see why. It has been created for us by Mine from some rather beautiful woods and consists of 5 oddly shaped pieces (one of which has a dowel sticking out) and two 2 voxel dowels. The box has a 3x3x3 cavity which is partially sealed by a 1 voxel lip and the pieces have 26 voxels plus the captive dowel would make 27. There are enough dowel shaped holes drilled into the pieces which would allow the 2 dowels to be included inside and also a hole for the captive one. Part of me did wonder whether the captive dowel was just supposed to protrude into the missing voxel but this would not be elegant and I very quickly abandoned that idea. Neither Mine-san nor Yasuhiro-san would make/design anything inelegant.

As I explained to Libby, the first thing to do is work out how to make the cube shape that might fit inside and then see whether the dowels would fit and finally assemble it in the box - easy peasy she said! I proceeded to make multiple attempts in front of her and she quickly realised that this was a proper challenge. I pointed out that having found a few cubic assemblies, it was possible to discount some because they required one of the pieces to be oriented in a position which was physically impossible to insert into the box. I quickly narrowed it down to a couple of possibilities and had to stop someone breathing a few times which gave me a breather to think about it (pun intended).

When I got back to the puzzle and the patient could breathe again, I made a rather special discovery...there was always one particular piece that would not fit in the box. Or, if I did fit it in early then it blocked the rest. Time to think©. I knew there was a rather special Aha! moment to this puzzle that separated it from the standard packing puzzle. I always seemed to get stuck on one particular piece which made me wonder about special techniques and, in front of Libby, I got struck by the Aha! moment and did something. The pieces all slid into place and both me and Libby had our wonderful jaw-dropping moment. Of course, she managed to look attractive doing it whilst I just sat there looking stupid with a big grin on my face. This is very very clever. I think it took me about 30 minutes including several breath-holding phases which is just about right. I think it is probably not very suitable for a newbie or non-puzzler but is an essential purchase for everyone else. The assembled puzzle is behind a spoiler button even though there is almost nothing really there to provide any info. Don't look if you are worried.

Solved it in half an hour - delightful!

If you get a chance to play then go for it.

In the meantime, I was forced to start clearing my desk which I had not seen in months

This was from months ago and it had gotten worse

Finally after multiple moves up and down stairs, I could see where the desk had once been:

Hooray! Nearly there - soon my ears will stop bleeding.

I did find a puzzle stand without a puzzle:

I had no idea what this belonged to

The helpful guys on FB chipped in to tell me that it was from Juno's SDCB but Shane, being even more helpful said that it was to display a VERY special "Rubic cube" - please note that was his spelling and, if you know Shane, then that's pretty good for him! So I found a bunch of VERY special Rubic cubes to show the stand off properly:

The one in the stand is one of just 3 Hexaminx crystals ever produced, to the left is a Master Rex cube and the right is a Master curvy copter (both very rare and special). Behind it is Kevin’s burr designed and made for me by Jose Diaz (later produced in greater numbers by the late Eric Fuller).

My new cabinets now have a few lovely cubes inside: