JCC Disentanglements and a Reason for Celebration

Hi guys, today I am very very grateful to the Puzzlemad Hawaiian correspondent, Mike Desilets, for helping me out whilst I am really busy - he has produced yet another really high quality guest post. This just happens to be the 400th post on the Puzzlemad website since starting out in March 2011 which is quite an achievement - I don't think I have ever stuck at a hobby for so long and I have to say that it is very much down to the wonderful community that I keep at it. Jerry has overtaken me by posting his 401st post a couple of days ago for which I give my hearty congratulations. At the bottom of this post is another reason for me to celebrate.

Mike seems to be uncannily aware when I need him and swings into action with a marvelous informative article for you (and me) to read - it is only fitting that I let him have post number 400. This article was going to be posted last weekend when Shane stepped in with his fabulous and pleasantly painful Viper which I was pleased to read also bit Allard.  The puzzles reviewed in Mike's article are some of the wonderful selection of disentanglement puzzles available from my friend Tomas Linden's Sloyd puzzle store which you really should check out (I have bought some more from him as a result of Mike's post). So without further ado I hand you over to Mike....

Aloha Kākou readers. Let me start this post by noting that, without any prior planning, Kevin and I are usually pretty well synchronized in that my occasional guest blogs arrive when he is at wits end with work and home responsibilities (Ed - indeed - I am on call today and so may well be unhappily ensconced in an operating theatre when I would much rather be reading and writing about puzzles). Unfortunately, this was not the case over the holidays. I’ve kept myself offline over the last few weeks (except for some puzzle shopping, of course), and during that time, I now learn, Kevin had one foot in the grave with his lovely (Ed - and violent) wife soon to follow (Ed - she's still there!). Seems like things have corrected themselves now, but I can’t help feel that I should have been more attentive. I also feel sorry for all his patients who had to forgo anaesthetics (Ed - corrected spelling) during their operations (Ed - the screaming was awful - I had to put my earplugs in). Anyhow, maybe this post will give Kevin a few hours to catch up on everything that was left undone during his illness.

Half Clover by Jean Claude Constantin.

An Extension to my Advice for Twisty Puzzlers

The Mo Fang/Qiyi 4 Leaf Clover Plus Cube

4 Leaf Clover Plus

4 Leaf Clover Plus movements

One of my all-time most popular blog posts is one that I am most proud of - it is my advice to twisty puzzle beginners post which I published way back in 2012. It is what I send to puzzlers who have taken time to work out how to solve a basic 3x3 and 4x4 Rubik type cube and want to know what path to take next. It is in no way a didactic set of instructions, I just walk through what many of the options are and discuss why one might want to go that route. I suspect that I should probably redo that post in the light of more recent developments in the Twisty world.

I still stick my initial advice that the first tentative steps beyond basic cubes should probably be the shape modifications to get your head around pieces that "don't look right" and then move on to the other geometries like Megaminx (dodecahedron) and Pyraminx (tetrahedron) but after those, there is a sudden increase in options which can be chosen between...for example the cuboids and those with alternative piece movements like the Dino cube (Shallow cut corner turn), Rex cube (Deep cut corner turn), Skewb (Very deep cut corner turn) and Curvy Copter (Edge turn) - each of these can also be multiple layers too.

Today's puzzle that I am reviewing is definitely not a basic puzzle for a novice but is a really nice example of a recently appeared new group of puzzles on the market. I am not sure what to call this group - maybe it could be called the "Combo puzzles"? These are puzzles which are effectively a combination of 2 different basic puzzles into one with 2 different turning mechanisms combined. I already reviewed one such puzzle, the Grilles II cube which is a combination of a standard 3x3 cube and a shallow cut Master (4x4) Dino cube:

3x3 turns and 2-level deep corner turns

The solving process for this was great fun and my main criticism of this puzzle was that the mechanism was quite unstable and had a tendency to explode into rather a lot of pieces if you were not extremely careful how you rotated it. If you want a copy of this (recommended if you have patience) from PuzzleMaster or HKNowstore.

These combination puzzles really intrigue me - there is a whole lot more scrambling possible with these than the individual base puzzles and then you have the probability that you can get into positions that are completely impossible with each. The approach to solving could be to try something totally unique and find your own commutators to shift pieces around or to try to reduce to one or other of the base puzzles and then solve that. The fun part of this is that there is a distinct possibility that the reduction can introduce parities where a piece has been reformed in an impossible position for the base puzzle - for example in the Grilles II it is possible to be left with a single turned corner which a 3x3 can never achieve. Resolving these parity situations can be one of the most fun parts of these puzzles.

There have not been very many puzzles with combined mechanisms released yet. The 3x3 Curvy Copter by MF8 is one that I have not bought because it was reputed to be so unstable as to be almost unusable

The puzzle I am specifically discussing today is the Mo Fang/Qiyi 4 Leaf Clover Plus cube (available from PuzzleMaster here, HKNowstore here, and UK Puzzlestore here) which is a combination of the wonderful edge turning of a deeper cut Curvy Copter and a 2x2 face turning Rubik cube. I originally got mine from Calvin's HKNowstore and they mistakenly sent me the plain 4 Leaf Clover Cube (no plus) which is just a deeper cut Curvy Copter but no face turns. It was a nice puzzle and fun to play with but not a new challenge. They were very good about sending me out the correct one I ordered with the next order that I placed with them.

I bought the Stickerless version which has the advantage of the Curvy Copter corners to be solved hidden inside the puzzle:

You can see the hidden corners sunk inside - an extra challenge is to solve these too even though they are not externally visible.

The puzzle turns fantastically well and is a joy to scramble. All the usual moves are possible including the jumbling moves that are the fun part of the curvy copter - jumbling to you non-twisty puzzlers or novices is the ability to take a piece out of its' orbit by partially turning an edge and combining it with another edge turn (all edge turners have jumbling as part of their abilities).

Back right is a face turn
Front left is a trio of moves ending a jumbled puzzle. 

After an initial fiddle about I just went for it! I usually spend time working out techniques and maybe a few algorithms but this time I figured I had enough background to these puzzles:

Fully scrambled, it looks quite fearsome!

So how would you approach such a puzzle? For me, the obvious thing to do was to return it to a cube shape and then solve the base 2x2 first which effectively reduces the puzzle to a plain 4 Leaf Clover/Curvy Copter Cube which should be solvable in the standard fashion (unless there were any Parities introduced).

Returning the Curvy Copter to cube shape can be a horrific experience as it gets very blocked but in this particular puzzle the 2x2 moves are unimpeded and using these it is a simple matter to move the edges into the right positions so that the jumbled pieces sticking out can be made flat again. Next step for me was to reduce the multicoloured edges - in the picture above there is a blue/white edge combined with a red/yellow edge at the front. Pairing up the edges is initially pretty easy and done purely with intuition. Having done one face of edges, I moved to the next layer up and this simple too - getting confident now! The next layer up the sides also wasn't too bad with only a little bit of fiddling about. The final face of edges...now that was quite a challenge! The first solve I went through, it just happened to work out that they were all just in place or on opposite faces of where they needed to be and I was lulled into a false sense of security. My second and all subsequent attempts at this puzzle have been a humungous challenge with edges in all sorts of places. It requires all sorts of moving 2x2 cubes about and rotating cubies and edges to finally get them back to either in place or opposite to where they should be. I have done this 7 or 8 times now and I can always do it but it is always a huge challenge which requires quite a bit of planning and moving pieces around.

Who would have thought that the toughest part of this puzzle would have been the 2x2 cube part? It is a brilliant challenge which I have yet to find a definitive sequence for. Maybe a better puzzler than me can manage it more quickly?

Having reduced the puzzle back to cube-shape and then recreated all the edges, the Curvy Copter solve process is exactly the same as normal. You have the choice whether to solve the hidden internal corners last or whether to solve them as you go like the usual CC puzzle - each choice has its own special challenges.

This is an absolutely brilliant puzzle and I can heartily recommend it to all twisty puzzlers who want to go beyond the basic cubes. It should probably be step 4 in your journey - I would recommend learning the basic cubes, then the shape mods and then the alternative turning puzzles before jumping on these. The progression is wonderful.

I think I will need to think about obtaining the Curvy Copter 3x3 to add another combo twisty to my collection.

Coming sometime in the future will be a review of a terribly fearsome puzzle - the Skewby Copter Plus:

Holy shit!

Curvy Copter edge turn AND a Skewb turn

This beast is a fearsome thing - it is a Curvy Copter PLUS (described in this article) which can swap out the centres and the corners as part of the jumbling process combined with a Skewb (deep cut corner turner). So far I have been too frightened to do any more than turn this thing!

If you are a puzzler who is hesitating over getting into twisty puzzles then don't! Do it! The learning process is quite steep at first but there is plenty of help out there and then once you have developed an arsenal of basic techniques then you are off and running. These puzzles are hugely challenging, have high repeatability and are pretty reasonably priced until you branch out into the hand made mods. Try it, you will probably like it...a LOT!

No Need to Fear It!

Progressive Exploration Helps a Solve

Master Clover Cube - looks ferociously tough

Halfway through last year I restarted purchasing twisty puzzles after a little hiatus (mostly induced by fear of how difficult the newer puzzles looked). This batch I worked through gradually over a few weeks and published about them here and here but the Master Clover cube caused me considerable anxiety...as an edge turner it is going to jumble and to shape-shift which is normally a fun challenge but with so many layers, this was potentially going to be painful. If you are not familiar with the concept then let me quickly explain. Normally with edge turning puzzles, the individual pieces are restricted in their positions to certain orbits and cannot leave them. However, a jumbling move occurs when a partial turn occurs of an edge which lines up the cuts enough to allow an adjacent edge to be rotated. This can cause shape-shifting if it isn't lined up with the opposite side or "just" take pieces out of their usual orbits. Part of the attraction to me with these edge turning puzzles is that there are two distinct solves to be done - a non-jumbled scramble can be mostly solved using an entirely intuitive approach without any fancy algorithms and just a bit/a lot of thought and planning - this is great fun usually. Then a jumbling scramble makes for a much tougher solve needing even more thought and often needs a more fancy algorithm or commutator to solve (and half the fun is working out these commutators). It also ends up with a hugely shape-shifted nightmare puzzle.

Inner edge turn and outer edge turn

A jumbling turn in process (outer edge)

I had put off the final one in that batch until just this week. It frightened me to death! I recalled that many years (2013) ago I had bought and eventually solved the big brother of the Master Clover Cube, Eitan's Master Curvy Copter and the process it had nearly killed me. It was a seriously difficult puzzle with a lot of shapeshifting and a hugely difficult set of commutators to find.

Are they subtly different? Both Master edge turners but a lot more pieces in the Curvy copter

Eventually after procrastinating a long time, I ended up discussing the puzzle with Derek who happened to be working on it at the same time. My fears seemed to fall on deaf ears and, as usual, he started to badger me to get on with it and eventually I succumbed when he practically screamed "DO IT" at me via FB messenger. This shamed me into at least trying a non jumbling scramble in the hope that it should be solvable by intuition:

"This should be fun", I thought/hoped and my initial approach was similar to how I solve the ordinary Curvy copter or Clover cube. 

I basically do it layer by layer working my way up from the white face. The petals in the Master clover cube are split up so it was just a matter of creating the white face (easy) and then assembling the 2 side faces of the corner pieces and then adding in the half petals. With delight I noticed that the centres and the corners are not separable so solving one solves the other. It can be a little arduous but I managed to get half of the puzzle solved really quite easily. I was on a roll and then I hit a problem - the half petals in the remaining half are much harder to pair up when there is very little room to play in. One of the most important things I realised was that doing the puzzle layer by layer always ends up with a scenario where there are single half petals that cannot be placed in the end game without doing jumbling moves to finish. I was ever so slightly disappointed in this but I should probably not have been surprised. It was always going to be unlikely that such a complex puzzle was going to end up with nice easy intuitive 3 cycles of pieces. Having solved the lower half, I was able to turn the puzzle back to that orientation and experiment with the jumbling moves to see what effect they have. In a normal Curvy copter, the double jumble swaps a the two opposite petals on adjacent faces as well as either side of the cube. This can occur here but it is possible to split the inner and outer edge jumbles as below:

A single jumble swap

Two jumble swaps

Four jumble swaps on both layers

As you can see that matching inner edges with the front outer edge swaps 4 petal pieces. Doing it twice swaps another 4 and then twice more leaves in a very nice scenario (pictured right). Could I use this? Oh yes, I was sure I had the puzzle beat...and then this happened:

Hell! Not enough pieces swapped!

I was stumped for ages. I tried every combination of jumbling that I could think of and was always left with 2 pairs of swapped petal pieces. Time to Think© - Ouch! that hurt. I eventually realised that I needed to swap 2 more pairs at the same time but not alter the faces. Think© you fool! Aha! A lovely moment happened when I realised that I could move petals from the bottom face onto each side and if they were swapped over in a double set of jumbling moves then there was no mixing up of something else that I didn't want mixed. YES! I had it solved layer by layer.

Reporting my success and struggle back to Derek, he replied that he had not had anywhere near so much trouble as me with a non-jumbled scramble. ???How is that possible? It transpired that he had reduced it to a standard Curvy copter first and this could be done without any jumbling moves at all. I had to have a try and yes this was also a LOT of fun. So many aspects to just one twisty puzzle. At this point we were both procrastinating...he said that he had not had time to do a full jumbled and shape-shifted scramble but practically shouted at me to get on with it! Gulp! I am, of course, too stupid to say no to an instruction like that so off I went. I note that Derek has still not fully scrambled his copy! 

First of all, I did a jumbled but not shape shifted scramble and at this point I was very pleased that I had done my earlier experiments and gained a lot of experience of what could be moved where - the solve took me a couple of hours of enjoyable fun. Then it was time to screw my courage to the sticking place and do it properly:

This might have been a very bad idea!

The shape-shifting does seem to get blocked at various points during the scramble. It is mostly internal and does feel like it could be pushed past. But my experience with the original Curvy copter plus warned me off forcing anything. Everything I had learned about the puzzle up to that point stood me in good stead. Returning to cube was no more than awkward and then it was just a fully jumbled solve. I love this puzzle! It is definitely less difficult than the Master curvy copter but in a way that is a good thing. The vast majority of this can be solved by intuition alone and then just a bit of experimentation using the already solved half will provide what you need to be able to complete it. There are several challenges (non-jumbled, reduction approach; non-jumbled, layer by layer, jumbled non-shape shifted and finally fully scrambled) - this is great value for money. I bought mine from the HKNowstore but for those of you in America/Canada then PuzzleMaster have it in stock as well. Go on, give it a try, you will love it!

There are a couple of other non-face-turning Master cubes that would be great if those wonderful cube producers would have a try at manufacturing: The Master Curvy Copter I have shown and the Master Rex Cube as well would be incredible:

3 Master cubes - hopefully the back two will be mass-produced

Qiyi Clover Pyraminx - Looks Fearsome But...

The Old Up-Up-Down-Down Works a Treat!

The Clover Pyraminx

An edge turning tetrahedron

This might be even more incoherent than my usual drivel. I have actually managed to have some time off and went to Edinburgh to visit some friends as well as relax and visit the Outlaws. A very nice relaxing time in all and a few very nice expensive meals as well. I have just arrived back home having driven 250 miles and am trying not to disappoint all you suckers lovely people who, for some reason, keep reading my rubbish. 

I had bought a few new twisty puzzles some weeks ago to try and catch up with the backlog of new toys that have come out and are being shown off by the return of Rline to YouTube. Amongst them was this Clover Pyraminx, a tetrahedral version of the edge turning Clover puzzles I have reviewed before.

I love edge turning twisty puzzles for several reasons...primarily because a lot of the solve process for them tends to be very intuitive right up to the very end game and also because they shapeshift and jumble, taking parts out of their natural orbits and often leaving all sorts of fearsome looking "sticky-out bits".

After just 4 moves!

Having seen the frightening shapeshifting, I quickly went back to the beginning and did my usual first approach for these and attempted a non-shapeshifting scramble using entirely 180º turns. It is a lovely turner but you do need to watch your thumbnails as the edges get caught and attempt to rip your nails off (YeeeeOuch!). It doesn't take long to get a nice mixed up puzzle and as expected the solve is a pleasant logical one of performing 3-cycles on the petals until they are all in place again. To you non-twisty puzzlers it sounds impossible but it really is just pure logic. The first 2 times that I did this, I magically ended up with an easily fully solved puzzle after just doing my logic solve process. At this point, my luck ran out because the centre triangles were scrambled when I had finished. For some silly reason I had just thought that solving the petals was just automatically solving the centres at the same time. As has been said by almost all puzzlers around the world: "you are not terribly bright sometimes"!

Oops! Now what?

I sat and stared at this for quite some time with absolutely no clue how to control the centres without mucking up the petals. In desperation I descrambled and resolved and from now on every single time left me with 3 centres swapped around. Not always the same ones but always three of them. It was time to Think©. I use the copyright symbol even if Allard cannot/won't do twisties because I know that if he really tried then he could easily do them. After some fiddling with the Up-Up-Down-Down combination for a while I had a Eureka moment (No, I did not make Mrs S sick by running around naked). A simple set of 4 moves moves 3 petals and leaves one centre piece from one face on an otherwise untouched 3rd edge. If I turn the third edge and undo the original 4 moves then I reverse all the petal moves but have created a 3-cycle of the centres. It is a COMMUTATOR and I found it all by myself - I am a genius! Ok, maybe not (that term refers to Derek) but having found my little set of moves I was now able to solve the simple scramble every time - Yay! Time to take the next step and do a full jumbling and shapeshifting scramble:

Oh dear! That wasn't a good idea!

Yet again I nearly lost my thumbnails and suddenly wished that I hadn't done that! The usual first stage is to return it to the original shape (it always leaves you with pieces out of orbit but you can sort that later). The process of returning to tetrahedron had me stumped again for quite some time. My first time I managed to almost do it before realising that every single edge was perpendicular to the correct orientation and I had created an unsolvable position. I corrected that and tried again. Each time I could get almost there but was always left with a protrusion (not bad for a man my age!) and yet again I had to think© - luckily for me the thinking© did not have to be deep. If I do my Up-Up-Down Down moves with a partial edge turn and it sinks the protrusions back inside...Mostly!

Where did that come from?

I managed to get it back to tetrahedral shape except there were black pointy bits sticking out and it was not terribly obvious where they had come from. They had no stickers on them and therefore were obviously internal pieces that had been left outside during scrambling and partial solving. Where did they belong? The clue to that came from looking at where they always appeared. They were always found in the place of the centres and I could eventually (after banging my head on the wall for a bit) workout that the centres were now inside the puzzle.

If you twist some of the edges until you find a little clue:

The centre is hidden in a little cavity inside the corner - in the picture to the left the red triangle is inside the puzzle and only revealed by partially turning an edge. So, how to I swap those? On various occasions, I have managed to get anything from one to 3 separate sticky-out bits on various faces. The secret to beat it? Yes, you are good at these! It is the Up-Up-Down-Down moves again. This time you need to do it with 2 edges hard turned out of place and then performing our magic sequence which returns the puzzle to proper shape. Phew! That wasn't too bad was it? Actually, it nearly killed me - all of these discoveries were over a period of 10-14 days and had my colleagues at work laughing at me when I either swore at the bloody thing for having protrusions or swore at it for injuring me. I really suffer for you guys, you know!

Once I had my shape again, I was able to do my intuitive solve using the magic sequence. This, I knew would only get me so far as some pieces will inevitably shifted out of their natural orbits and would not have been returned by the removing of the shapeshifting. Eventually, I ended up with something like this (sometimes on several faces)

Nearly solved but 2 petals are out of orbit (ignore the centres)

With the Curvy copter or related Clover cube (both cubic edge turners), this sort of issue is sorted by carrying out double jumbling moves to swap orbits until they are back in the correct orbit and then can be moved into place by intuition. There aren't enough faces to do that here and I had to adapt the magic technique to allow the fix to happen. Again we have a 3-cycle of pieces using the simple 4 move sequence but starting with a partially turned edge:

Turn one edge and then cycle those petals

Using the front left and right edges and starting with the left one, I can do a Down-Down-Up-Up and those 3 petals cycle around until they are correctly placed. After that is done with all the orbit errors, then the centres may need to be solved and you are done! Fantastic! I worked it out all by myself with only a little (alright, a LOT) of help from Allard. My colleagues were amazed and everyone thought I was brilliant.

And then I tried to do it a few more times and found something awful:

It's a 2-cycle! That's impossible!

My colleagues laughed at the look of horror on my face when I came up with this scenario. I had just 2 centres swapped and as any twisty puzzler knows, a 2-cycle is against the "law of the cube". This is just impossible. 

After my initial blank thoughts, I went back to some of my early blog posts and realised that I had an error caused by a "False equivocation". This occurs when you place a piece into position because it looks like it should go there but in reality it is out of place. This can occur either because it looks identical to some other piece or because it has no stickers to tell you where it belongs (this was the case here). I realised that I had put the blank sticky out bits back inside the puzzle but they were placed randomly into whatever vertex I found. I realised that I had inadvertently swapped 2 of this blank internal pieces with each other and had no way of knowing. The manifestation on the outside was a pair of swapped pieces but in reality it was 2 pairs of swapped pieces and this is perfectly possible and relatively easy to fix. I used my earlier fancy move to take a vertex out and swap it with a centre and then replace it with a different vertex before putting the second one back where the first had been. This invariably left me with a 3cycle of centres to do and my puzzle was done. Hooray!

This is actually a wonderful puzzle - it is not too difficult for any experienced twisty puzzler and has some interesting features to make it a must-have in the collection. I would also say that anyone who is just starting out on twisty puzzles should also obtain a copy - solve the Clover cube or Curvy copter first and then move onto this one. It takes you several steps further in your solving and learning process without being too frustrating. Just watch out for those thumbnails! It is available from most good puzzle stores - PuzzleMaster have it here, or you could try the Hong Kong stores. Well worth your money!

The Curvy Copter Taken to Extremes - It's Still Great Fun!

Very Puzzle's Clover Cube

I've had a nother really busy week and just not had enough time to get fully to grips with the Revenge Lock from Wil Strijbos that I showed off last week. Luckily for all of you Allard has reviewed it for you here and I will hopefully get to write something next week. But I still have something very interesting to show off today. Yes, I know that it's a twisty puzzle and I know that half of you puzzlers switch off when you see one but with this one you really shouldn't! Today I am going to discuss the next iteration of one of my favourite group of twisty puzzles - the edge turners.

A long long long time ago I went crazy over Tom Z's curvy copter - it was my first ever mass produced edge turning puzzle and going along with that it had the special ability to "jumble" which effectively means that different piece types can be interchanged and then they start to block each other. A side effect of this is that the puzzle becomes ferociously misshapen when scrambled which adds hugely to the "fear factor". BUT and it is a very big BUT, whilst the edge turners look horrific, they are actually very nice logical puzzles which seem not to require lots and lots of algorithms to be committed to memory. They are so so good because they can be solved by intuition and understanding and only a very simple single algorithm is required for the final stage of shifting and turning corners. So let me emphasize:

The edge turning twisty puzzles are NOT hugely complex - they are nice intuitive puzzles

S o don't switch off/go away - these are definitely puzzles to be considered for any puzzler who can think© and who can think logically - at most a simple 4 move algorithm might be needed.

Those dastardly designers continued to work on the edge turning puzzles and produced further versions that were either deeper cut or allowed the blocking pieces (during jumbling) to be split and this made for the Curvy Copter 3 and Curvy Copter plus respectively:

Above we have the Curvy Copter 3 with deeper cuts giving us extra pieces

This is the Curvy Copter Plus with petal pieces that are split in half to allow further mixing

Apart from the inevitable move to other Platonic solids (the curvy dodecahedron was a wonderful extension of the series) we all thought that the only other way to give us more fun challenges (remembering that all of these puzzles were pretty intuitive in their solution) would be to go higher order. This has not been mass produced as yet but one of my "pride and joy" puzzles which I must admit is not quite as intuitive as all the others is the Master curvy copter designed and produced by the incredible Eitan Cher. This was effectively a 4x4 version and was one of my puzzles of the year in 2013.

I have to admit that this one is a bit less intuitive than the others!

I honestly did not expect to see any more edge turners produced but was truly delighted when one of the most innovative puzzle designers and manufacturers, Leslie Le, of the Very Puzzle company announced last year the imminent production of totally new edge turning puzzle, the Clover Cube which is pictured at the top of the post. I bought mine from my good friend Marty who has a fabulous store based in the UK but it is also available from other stores including Puzzle Master in North America. This puzzle is very reasonably priced considering the amazing complexity of the construction.

The clover cube looked like something truly special - it was still an edge turner but instead of going deeper cut or higher level, Leslie had chosen to make the cube a bit bigger (it's a huge 9cm cube!) and used that space to have 2 overlapping edge segments that can turn:

One edge turned - it doesn't align fully!

3 edges turned - jumbling!!!!

It's my puzzling look!

The jumbling that can occur with all the other edge turners still happens and it shape shifts in a truly fascinating way! Of course I HAD to buy it but was just a teensy bit worried that it might not be as intuitive and easy as the other edge turners. After all, I am not terribly bright and if it gets really difficult then I would be in trouble!
Despite what Allard said about me here in his write up of the 26th MPP, I don't usually solve lots of puzzles in a short space of time with ease. I spend a lot of my time making the lots of annoying noises and also amusing Mrs S by looking like Plug from the Bash Street Kids.

I just scrambled it without any exploration!

After my initial horror at the sheer size of it, I threw caution to the wind and just scrambled it! There was no exploration or anything....I figured that it should be very like the other edge turners and would be pretty easy! I did get a bit of a shock when I looked at the final result and this was carried around with me for several months. I tried what I had done with the original Curvy Copter and I was getting nowhere fast. It remained in my bag for ages and taunted me until Derek also started to taunt me about it.

Intuition will get you back to cube shape as that is just a matter of playing with it. After that you need to take a leaf from Allard's book and truly THINK© Playing with just one side of the cube and adjacent edges, I realised that there was just a 4 move algorithm that could be used very creatively to cycle 3 pieces. With setup arrangements it became very obvious that you could use the same 3 cycle to swap edges about or to to move the petals with attached corners. The Aha! moment was fantastic and all of a sudden I was on my way!!! Yessssss!

I knew the corners were going to be awkward but hopefully I could rapidly work my way through the other pieces. There are quite a lot of pieces to this puzzle so it took a while to work through. I was really enjoying myself for 2 or 3 evenings and Mrs S continued to laugh at "Plug" but I was a happy puzzler. It took me 2 evenings alone to work out how to get the last 4 edges pieces into place - not being very bright, I had forgotten that I could use four separate 3cycles to cycle 4 pieces around. After that the petals were a dream to move once I had worked out the setup moves.

I was left with the corners and looking at them it became clear that there was a very simple intuitive method to just swap 3 of them around and that would rotate them clockwise too. It was just a matter of thinking again! After 3 months of hesitation and nearly 2 weeks of proper play it was solved. THIS IS A BRILLIANT PUZZLE!

Of course the advantage of the twisty puzzles is the replay value - there's often a new nuance to be found in subsequent solves. After a short discussion with Derek who had also solved his, I scrambled it again but this time I used my solving techniques to scramble it really really well!! I started again with glee and all was going well when.......Nooooo! Something impossible occurred! I had been moving the edges about again and was expecting to get my previous 4 pieces left to place at the end of that section. I sat back with a look of disbelief on my face when I realised that I had just 2 edges left to swap....... this is NOT possible! The "law of the cube" means that a 2 piece swap is never something that is required. I was missing something. I was completely stumped and actually frozen into immobility. Sometimes I would just rescramble a puzzle when this happens in the hope that I can get out of it in the next solve. But here I didn't want to solve this by chance, I needed to understand it.

So how can a 2 cycle be changed to a 3 cycle? I am sure that all you clever puzzlers out there can just look at the puzzle and scream the solution at me! What I need is to find something else that I can interchange with the edge pieces and then put back somewhere else. It took me a further 2 evenings to realise that there are 4 petals of each colour. The petals can be swapped with the edges temporarily and hence I eventually realised that this was the solution - I just needed to do four 3 cycles involving petals and edges and I would have fixed my conundrum. Again the aha! moment was truly awesome! I repeat:

THIS IS A BRILLIANT PUZZLE!!! You really should buy it! 

I still need to solve it a few more times to finally say that I have mastered it but it is yet another candidate for my end of year top 10. There is much about it that is just intuitive as it relies almost entirely on a single 4 move sequence with setup moves. It requires thought rather than memory of algorithms which is the reason I love edge turners. I have been a bit sidetracked this last week by the wonderful new toy from Wil Strijbos that I mentioned here.

Of course, Leslie has not rested on his laurels there! He has produced a whole series of these wonderful new edge turners! I have the Clover dodecahedron and Icosahedron waiting for me and hopefully Marty will get the 2 Octahedra in stock soon as well.

Looks ferocious

But it should just be like the cube but MORE!

This should be a very similar solve to the cube (I hope) but I haven't had the courage to scramble it yet! The Dodecahedron is available from Puzzle Master here or from Marty here.

Holy Crap!

2 adjacent edges turn

The corners turn too

The Icosahedron has an awful lot of pieces but also has the added "twist" that the corners rotate as well as the edges - the design skills in these puzzles are incredible.

It is available from Marty here and I am sure that Puzzle Master will be getting them in stock soon.

Don't be frightened of twisty puzzles - the edge turners are very logical and need thought rather than algorithms. You CAN remember 4 moves!!!