Revitalised By An MPP!

Bicolor 1365 by Koichi Miura
Purchased from Mine

I've been in a bit of a puzzle slump recently. Too busy and too tired to really play with much. It's only been the constant pressure of the blog that has kept me working on solving stuff and often I find myself leaving it until I have just a day to go before publishing to start playing. I really need to cut down the amount I work. I'm getting too old for it - I discovered yesterday, to my horror, that I am older than Frank, Big Steve and Allard! Damn! I'm old! 😱

That's quite something!

I received a bunch of puzzles from Mine at the beginning of the year and have put them in my file of puzzles to be played with and just left them there. Part of the reason for not playing was the strange warping that happened to the lid of one of the puzzles which occurred between the time they were manufactured and the time they were sent/received. Whenever I looked at it, I just got a disappointed feeling. Mine had apologised to everyone and it is an unfortunate side effect of the use of two different woods side by side. 

Every time I looked at the pile I felt guilty and picked one or two from the Mine delivery up and played a little before failing and putting them back... Until last night and this morning when I had a sudden rush of something to the head!

Yesterday was the 55th MPP (at least that's what LCVX seems to mean even if it is completely invalid Roman Numerals). I managed to work my way through 1 or 2 burrs in the shape of locks and even some in the shape of a tetrahedron and also worked my way through 4 or 5 of the Karakuri Xmas presents which was fun. I really got quite badly stuck on the set of Demonticons and needed quite a lot of assistance. I really must buy them soon. One fun thing to watch was Big Steve and Amy working on the Bicolor 1365 from Mine. It's a brilliant design by Koichi Miura which looks to be deceptively difficult based on the two of them working on it for ages and bickering at each other like an old married couple! The whole group of us got a LOT of entertainment watching them fail for a VERY long time. Needless to say, this motivated me to get my copy out when I got home and whilst watching TV that evening with the present Mrs S, I experimented and saw just how difficult it was.

Instructions

When the lid is placed, the colours will not match

I am not allowed to show the pieces but it is interesting because it consists of a box with a 3x3x2 voxel cavity with a fixed cubic on the base of the box and another fixed on the lid. The pieces completely fill the cavity and consist of 3 full voxel pieces and 4 more made with ½ voxels. It arrives in a solved state but in the "warmup state". I tipped the pieces out and examined them - the split pieces all fit together nicely to make whole ones and obviously I walked right into Koichi-san's trap! I spent the whole evening managing to create quite a few of the 1365 possible assemblies.

Every single time, I managed to fail to create the one single correct assembly that would allow the lid to be placed the correct way around. Finally, it was bed time and I put it down with relief. Sunday morning bright and groggy, I went back to work on it. Doing the same thing over and over again like Steve and Amy eventually got frustrating and I had a little think©. That hurt quite a bit and after recovering from the shock, I had a little fiddle with the split pieces to see how else they could be assembled and how they might then interact with the whole pieces. At some point after a couple of hours there was a really big Aha! moment and I tried something new. It wasn't quite right but I could tell I was nearly there. All I needed to do was fiddle a little bit and yessssss!

Take my word for it - the pieces are inside!
It's still a shame about the warping but the puzzle is great!

Having actually solved something thanks to the MPP, I figured that I should keep going whilst I was on a roll:

Bram's Hinged Cube
3D printed by Allard

The whole world is aware of Bram Cohen for a number of reasons. We all know of him as a brilliant puzzler and designer. Very recently he showed off a new design and allowed the puzzle to be made freely available by releasing the stl files for printing. When I arrived in Birmingham, there were a bunch of these available for grabs and I couldn't resist a lovely lilac copy (maybe Mrs S might like it? Whack! Ouch! That will be a no then.)

As you can see, each cube has a hinge on it attaching it to an adjacent cube and 3 of them are attached to 2 cubes. 2 of the cubes have a "blocker" on them which will interfere with adjacent hinges. The aim is to manipulate the hinges to assemble a 2x2x2 cube in such a way that the blockers don't clash. The rotation of the chains of cubies cause them to interfere with each other and there should be no force involved. This looked so good that I picked up another couple of copies to give away to colleagues at work. 

Two more copies to give away.
Notice that there're quite a few flat shapes to be made.

Playing with this is fascinating and reminiscent of the old Rubik's snake. It gets blocked very quickly and the temptation is to force pieces to move past each other. Resist that temptation as you don't want to pop a hinge. It is a fun thing to play with - several times I created a 2x2x2 cube with just one cube out of place and, after a good hour, I got an almost there solution but we all know that "almost" is not solved.

Blocked from achieving the solution

Finally after a couple of hours I had an Aha! moment and could see the correct cube assembly but getting the pieces into place was a big challenge. It required me to undo almost the whole thing to move pieces out of the way before trying again in a different order:

Bram is a genius!
Thanks to Allard for making me a copy.

Undoing it is also a bit of a challenge - I could not for the life of me work out how to return to the starting flat shape. To my shame it took me a good 20 minutes! And now I can't repeat the solve which means I didn't understand it at all - time to keep 

I even managed to solve an easier puzzle that Allard gave away:

Stella Octangular Puzzle

I couldn't resist this - straight away I realised that this was a version of the Triangular star puzzle. In fact, as far as I can tell it is identical and creates a very pleasing shape when assembled

Very pleasing - Just pull opposite vertices to disassemble

I am now busy working on a copy of Stewart Coffin's Diamonds puzzle (STC #269) which looks fairly simple but so far the full assembly has eluded me:

Diamonds (STC #269) printed by Allard

As you can see, attending an MPP has revitalised my puzzling - it's not an entirely solitary pastime this. Playing with friends and watching others struggle is very good for the motivation.

Don't tell Mrs S but I might have acquired a new lock whilst there. Andrew Coles is about to release a new lock to the world. The Clutch Lock is beautifully made and so far, I have done one thing and discovered why it has that name. It might be years before I make the next discovery!

Clutch Lock by AC puzzles

Looking forward to the next MPP in May - it may be the next time I solve anything! 😱