Lulled Into A False Sense Of Security By Frederic

...And Tye

Haeckel Sphere designed by Lee Krasnow

It seems like I place an order with Tye Stahly quite frequently. Mrs S certainly thinks so! In my recent delivery, I couldn't resist adding a new design that the amazing Lee Krasnow has come up with, the Haeckel Sphere. I let Tye choose the colour scheme and when it duly arrived I took a photo and put it on my puzzle tray. One evening we had a Teams meeting for our group of orthopaedic anaesthetists and during that meeting I couldn't resist picking it up much to the horror of people in the group.  It was not clear to me how it came apart so I grabbed it on opposite sides and pulled. It duly separated in two and then promptly fell to bits in my lap to the amusement of several onlookers.

12 identical pieces

It was hard to concentrate on the meeting whilst working out how this went back together. It's not terribly hard to decide how the pieces assemble but at several points it requires a bit of dexterity to recreate the two halves and align them correctly to get it back together. There are quite a lot of colour options suggested by Lee to create extra puzzle assembly challenges of different external patterns - if you order from Tye then I am sure that you can get various colour schemes.

Flushed with success, I couldn't resist moving on to one of the many puzzles designed by Frederic Boucher. Over the years I have bought, been given and reviewed many puzzles by Frederic and uniformly enjoyed and been bamboozled by them. Amongst my favourites (and Allard's) are the various Minima puzzles but Frederic does do other types. I have a few of his tray packing puzzles and have always struggled with them. I put it down to the fact that I am simply awful at them.

In the last delivery was a beautiful packer with wooden pieces made from colourful cubes (produced by Baz). Tye created the nice tray for them. It's called Artefacts.There are two sets of challenges:

Artefacts side A

The tray is 5x5 and the wooden pieces consist of paired cubies which are connected to each other at a half cubic overlap plus a peg which is effectively a 2x1 shape. The first challenge is to pack all the wooden pieces and the peg flat into the tray. There are 3 possible solutions.

Showing that I am an eejit with these, it took me 2 days to find the first packing pattern. The half voxel attachment really caused me issues. I ended up trying lots of random placements over and over again until something clicked and I had my "what if" thought©. Having found that one, I realised that the next was just a matter of flipping a couple of the pieces. Yay! Maybe I am less of an eejit? Then I went for the third assembly and I realised that I hadn't improved at all. It took me a whole day of play to find it!

The next challenge set by Frederic is to put the peg on its end in the hole in Tray A and then assemble the 5 wooden pieces in the tray around it (only one solution). I thought to myself that this should be an easy prospect. After all, the end on peg is just a single voxel in the centre rather than the 2 on its' side. I set to work and it proved to be a lot of work! OMG! Why is it so difficult? I spent several more days failing to solve this one. I got a bit desperate and even resorted to Burrtools. Much to my horror, Burrtools was unable to find a solution! This meant that Frederic had lulled me into a false sense of security with the initial challenge! I was going to have to place at least one of the pieces in the tray at an angle. So far after over a week of attempts, I have failed. Turning any of the pieces even slightly diagonally seems to block off a lot of space and makes it impossible to place the other pieces. I have tried to be systematic and try placing each of the pieces individually at an angle but to no avail. Frederic has beaten me - sob!

In desperation, I moved on to the third challenge with this puzzle. Side B of the tray has small half voxel bulges on each edge at odd positions. 

Artefacts side B

The offset position of the bulges leaves a 2 voxel gap on one side and a 1½ voxel gap on the other which prevents placement of a pice flat in that gap. The challenge here is to find a set of 4 of the wooden pieces that can be packed flat in the tray. It's not clear whether it is possible with all combinations of 4 or just one of the 5 sets of combinations. I have tried all of them several times and completely failed to find any packing method that can get them in. It's been days!!

Again, I created a BT file for this part of the challenge and not one of the combinations of 4 pieces can be fitted inside the tray orthogonally. I then attempted to search for tilted assemblies but the bulges completely bugger that up for me!

Yet again, I have been beaten by Frederic and Tye! I've given up for the moment but may well go back to it when I am feeling like being a sucker! Thanks guys for the lesson in humility! 😱😱😱