T w e n t y S i d e d

As a follow up to yesterday’s post about the nameless Chinese puzzle that Steven was working on, I’ve put together a few screencaps from the ones that gave me trouble. I think everyone else has beaten all of these by now, and I’m curious if anyone else has alternate solutions to any of these. Number 6, 13, and 18 in particular felt like they may have had more than one arrangement that would lead to the solution, but I wasn’t up to the job of finding out.

I hasitate to post these here, lest someone be tempted to peek at the solutions. If I could have peeked last night, I would have, and would have been robbed of the pleasure of beating number six on my own.

Spoilers follow.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Chinese Puzzle Torture, comparing notes”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Looks like I’m not the only one puzzleblogging today. Steven links to this insidious game. The first five puzzles are minor speed bumps, and as Steven points out, the sixth one is a wall. A wall five meters tall, utterly smooth, and crowned with barbed wire. I’d think it was impossible but Steven has already done it. Now the puzzle taunts me.

The fact that the directions are in Chinese should not deter you. It’s pretty much intuitive. Besides, I’m pretty sure that characters just say, “HA HA! You never solve this one, round-eye!”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Whew…

Solving these sorts of toy puzzles is a lot less like solving jigsaw puzzles or crosswords, and much more like cryptography. Beating the thing is not about searching for the solution, but more about building the tools that can take you from any arbitrary arrangement to the solved state.

I don’t know how other people go about it, but once I get serious about a puzzle, I sit down and start developing some tools. For example, I’ll come up with a series of moves that, if you hold the puzzle just so and perform these exact movements, it will (say) swap a couple of pieces without disturbing the rest. To record these moves (so I can look them up in five minutes, which is about how long it will take me to forget) I also need some system of notation. For me this is a series of symbols that will record each move. My system of notation for this thing consisted of four diagonal arrows, which was nice and simple.

This puzzle was a gift my wife picked up for me at a yard sale somewhere. I assumed the name was “Meffert’s Challenge”, since that’s what is written on the side. I looked it up, and it turns out that this puzzle is rightly called “3-D Creative Puzzle Ball“. Meh. Not very catchy.

The thing about this puzzle that I find curious is that two of the faces (the ones with the words) are not colored to match their neighbors in any way, which means that they could swap places and change orientation and the puzzle would still be “solved”. This is not true of other toy puzzles I’ve worked with. It certainly made this one easier, which is good. If I had needed to line up those two side pieces (which is how I think of them) then the thing might have been too hard for me. Having said that, I’m tempted to take some colored magic markers and put some dots on them just so I can observe how they shift around as I work with the thing.

This is the most fun I’ve had with a puzzle in a long time. The Rubik’s 4×4 is the absolute limit of my ability, and more recent puzzles have left that thing (and me) far behind, with puzzles of such astounding complexity that I never even know how to begin. A good example is this technicolor horror:

Pure evil. Colorful, though.

This “3-D creative thingy puzzle” was within reach, and I was able to tackle it in a few days instead of ramming my head against it for weeks, which is how things went in high school with Rubik’s 4×4.

Anyway, that was fun.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I realize these puzzle posts are kind of odd: Not much to discuss here. However, there is a certain degree of satisfaction derived from conquering one of these things, and that sense of victory is heightened when I can share the moment with someone. People who know me have already learned to make excuses and leave the room quickly when they see me wandering around with a grin and one of these things in my hand, so I thought I’d just post my progress here. At least when you don’t read it I won’t know. See?

Right. Anyway: Victory!

Ahem. Well. Almost…

Most of my problem has been trying to unlearn what I’d learned about puzzles. I had to overcome my mental block that was forcing me to think of the ball as a globe with the words at the two poles. I had to stop trying to figure out which line was the “equator”. I kept trying to impose symetry that wasn’t there, and it was confusing me.

The puzzle is, as I suspected, quite a bit simpler than a Rubik’s Cube. At one point I completed a ring and found I’d completed a second one by accident. There are a lot less combinations, and it’s probably not that unlikely that someone would solve it by accident. (At the height of the Rubik’s craze there was a pyramid shaped puzzle like that: I never bothered to make a methodical solution because you could solve it easier with just luck. Just solve one side after another, ignoring the fact that you’re messing up what you’ve already done, and you’ll blunder into the solved state before too long. This puzzle is more complex and accidental solution isn’t that easy to come by, but I can see it happening.)

This is the most fun I’ve had with a puzzle in a long time, now that I’m making progress. The last couple I’ve tried were just beyond me, and those are never much fin. I think this one is within my reach if I just keep at it.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

This is what Meffert’s Challenge looks like solved:

And this is what mine looks like. All the time:

Meffert’s Challenge should be a good deal easier than Rubik’s Cube. The number of permutations is clearly lower, since there are fewer “pieces” moving about. The problem is the thing changes shape as you work with it. In the first picture you see a face with lettering on it. There is an identical twin on the opposite side. My brain really wants to think of these as north / south poles on this globe, which is a mistake since they move around. You can get these two faces right next to each other. In fact, there is no move you can make that will not change the position of these two faces relative to one another. To put it another way: There is no equator division.

I had the same problem with Sqare-1. (which has an online version you can play here.) The lack of symetry just kills me. I can’t get me head around it.

Even allowing for my increasing senility as I ascend into my dotage, I can’t help thinking that the puzzle should not be as hard as it is. I can’t even make headway with it. I can’t even come up with any sort of process that will lead to a solution. I just spin the blasted thing until I go cross-eyed.

I usually have a puzzle in reach for when I need to do something like a large recompile, which will occupy my computer for a few minutes. These five-minute slices of time are annoying because they are too short to really make use of, but too long to spend idle. So, I keep a Rubik’s Cube or one of it’s decendants handy to keep my hands busy while I wait. But this one is really pissing me off. Arg.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.