April fool... in November

[miriam_e]

I'm a bit of a sucker for puzzles. When I was in a shop the other day I saw a wooden block puzzle which looked intriguing and it was only a dollar or two so I bought it. Later I was looking at it and figured one piece would be the key, so I was pushing gently at various parts experimentally. One moved a little, so I looked more carefully at the puzzle while trying to push the part back in, which it wouldn't do. It was caught on one of the other pieces. I jiggled it to try and move the piece back in and the whole thing fell apart. Oh boy, I thought. This one is going to be tricky to put together.

That evening I fiddled about trying, without success, to re-assemble it.

Much later I had another shot at it using the "cheat-sheet". This time I was able to assemble it up to the final part which, it seems to me, is logically impossible to insert. Weird. Also, it bothered me that my memory of the original, assembled puzzle doesn't look like the cheat-sheet version. Even worse, there were 2 parts left over. Counting the blocks in the "solution" yields 12 blocks. But the puzzle contains 14 blocks!

I have this image of some guy in a Chinese toy factory hatching this plot to drive westerners nuts by selling them a puzzle for which the cheat-sheet solution is impossible.

I've included a quick sketch I did of one of the blocks. All 14 blocks are identical. Anybody have any ideas?

Comments

[annie-lyne.livejournal.com]

why not build a VR model of it, assemble them in VR? :)

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

heheheh :) I was thinking of it... except that it might be an even more colossal waste of time than fiddling with the puzzle in the first place.

When I want to re-arrange furniture I tend to build a quick VR model and fiddle with that first. But that actually makes good sense, because moving furniture around is difficult enough that it is best not to experiment with the real thing -- move it only to the final position.

[annie-lyne.livejournal.com]

A little offtopic, but your post reminded me of this: it might interest you that there is a particular result in mathematics that essentially says that assuming that certain things are true, you can cut up a sphere into tiny little pieces and then reassemble them to make two identical spheres, the same size as the original.

[elffin.livejournal.com]

Read here via Flemco. And just. can't. resist. Geek. Bait ...

Only if you assume continuous - as opposed to discrete - calculus. The assumptions are that you may cut the sphere up into infinitesimally small pieces, and taken to the absurd, the original sphere may be reproduced /ad infinitum/.

It's one of my favorite ways of demonstrating why one should question and corroborate one's results and what may be broken with the current model of Physics.

[annie-lyne.livejournal.com]

No, it's a consequence of assuming the Axiom of Choice.

[elffin.livejournal.com]

Right you are.

I was thinking of the cube puzzle yesterday

[senseless.livejournal.com]

Deja Vu,

I have a bunch of little scraps of oak left from doing the floors in the house and yesterday while I was sanding I was wondering where I could get one of those so I could copy it.

Re: I was thinking of the cube puzzle yesterday

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Here ya go. The measurements are in millimeters, but of course could be anything. The end pieces are not important, and can be any size. The important features are that the cross-section is square and is the same size as the center tooth in the top image. Gaps are slightly bigger than solid parts to make it easier to snugly fit pieces together.

I think the easiest way to make this puzzle would be to clamp 16 pieces together and run a router down them twice to make the two cut-outs of the top image. Unclamp them and rotate each piece 90° then clamp them again and run the router down the middle to make the single channel. Unclamp and throw away the two end pieces that will have been damaged by the clamps and possibly the router. Presto! You have the 14 puzzle pieces to drive yourself batshit with. :)