Osanori's Packing - Heaven and Hell

Pack 012 - heaven

Quite a long time ago Tom Lensch was kind enough to let me know that he was going to be making another beautiful copy of the Hoffman Packing Puzzle in gorgeous woods and, being a collector who loves his wood, I jumped at the chance. When the notice that he had completed them came through and the request for a little (quite a bit) of PayPal arrived, he also said that he was about to begin making a few copies of the latest packing delight from Osanori Yamamoto that had been showed off on Facebook recently. This new one was called Pack 012 which I initially struggled to understand why it had been so named. I had wondered whether it was because of the number of cubies/voxels in the shapes but was baffled when I counted 13. Now looking at the photo above I can see that the 3 pieces are effectively shaped like an O, a 1, and a 2 - Doh!

Pack 3

Tom had made the frame from Maple with the lid and base available either as American Walnut or as more Maple - I am a sucker for contrasting woods and you can see what choice I made. I think that the pieces to be packed were made of Padauk. The craftsmanship is stunning - the angles are beautiful and the joints perfectly smooth - I adore this sort of quality. This puzzle is surprisingly reminiscent of another recent puzzle from Eric Fuller that I had reviewed, the Pack 3. This puzzle also was very beautiful and surprisingly difficult (with one false solution).

I set to playing with this straight away - the aim, obviously, is to pack the 3 pieces inside the box. It looks very simple but the diagonal hole in the corner of the box, through which the pieces must be inserted, is surprisingly restricting. I am always very suspicious of puzzles by Osanori because a large number of them require rotational solutions and I automatically start exploring and looking for any sneaky little trick that may be possible. Tom's sturdy box and accurate pieces showed no sign at all of having any room to rotate at all in anything other than the z-axis i.e. the pieces could be twisted in the box but not made to stand up or lie down once they were inside. Maybe this was not a sneaky puzzle? After about a ½ hour of play, I had found a way to pack all three pieces inside.

They are inside but this is curiously unsatisfying

After my initial frisson of pleasure, I became aware of a curious dissatisfaction. Whilst all 3 pieces have been packed, the conformation is just not elegant. One thing to realise about Osanori's puzzles is that the solutions are almost always pleasing to the eye and leave a feeling of satisfaction at their elegance. This same thing had occurred to me with the Pack 3 puzzle and after discussing it with my genius friend, Derek, I was left knowing that my solution was not the required one. Back to the drawing board.

The following day, I returned to it and, again, convinced myself that rotations were not part of it. I proceeded to try various assemblies outside of the box. Luckily with just 3 fairly simple pieces, it is relatively straight-forward to make an assembly and then work backwards through a disassembly. Derek had assured me that this one should not really tax me much and, having put aside my disbelief, I worked on it for another ½ hour. AHA! He was right - this is perfect! It is simpler than Pack 3 which seriously challenged quite a lot of puzzlers. It is probably quite on a par with the Pin Block Case - about an hour of pleasant fiddling for most puzzlers. I don't think that the picture of the solved puzzle gives too much away but I have hidden it behind a button. Only push the button if you want to see the completed packing.

All packed up - a lovely challenge!

The Pack 012 was the packing puzzle "Heaven" - what, therefore, is the packing puzzle "Hell"? This, my dear reader, is the Galette packing puzzle, also designed by Osanori Yamamoto.

Galette - hell

I had first come across the Galette puzzle as an entry in the IPP design competition in Paris in at which it was one of the top ten vote-getters. I had spent quite a lot of time on it in the competition room in Paris and had singularly failed to find a solution. I was delighted when Tom had offered it for sale after the IPP was completed and my copy arrived in October last year.

It looks like a simple packing puzzle with 5 tetromino pieces to be inserted into the covered rectangular space inside the frame. Again, rotations are possible (even required) around the z-axis but there is no way to stand a piece up on its edge. This is explained by the name - Galette is French for Wafer. The extra little twist to make this really tough is that the entry to the packing space is only through a 3x2 unit space in the lid or through a 1 voxel space in the lower edge. The extra interesting feature is that the bottom edge entry is part of the packing space - there are 21 voxels available and 20 voxels in the pieces - where is the gap supposed to be?

I went to play as soon as this arrived last year and after a week got quite demoralised. I put it away for a month and then tried again - nope! This went on for several months - I just could not find a solution! I became convinced that there must be 100s of possible assemblies to sift through and trial and error was required. After about 4 months I made a Burrtools file to count the assemblies - the required rotational moves told me that BT could not solve it for me, but at least I could find out how many hundreds of possible assemblies there might be.

BT worked on the challenge for exactly........1 second (on my 13-year-old computer) and told me that the space could hold the enormous number of 11 assemblies! Damn! I am really not very good at puzzling! I have picked it up again for a week or so every month and had a play - one of my issues with many packing puzzles is that I feel that there is too much random trial and error and not enough deduction in the solution challenge. Here, there is the challenge of finding the assembly and then working out how to put it in the box through the 2 small openings. I ended up taking notes on the shapes that I had tried and ruled out before suddenly finding something critical in February. I had my rather lucky Aha! moment and was left wondering why it had taken me so long. For me, this has been packing puzzle hell!

At last!

I really do not know how I did it and actually doubt whether I could solve it again! I am left wondering why it did so well in the design competition? For me, the amount of trial and error was too great. I love the craftsmanship but am not in love with the challenge.

As for trial and error, my initial approach to the gorgeous Hoffman packing puzzle has been one of frustration.

Hoffman packing puzzle - OMG - hell on earth!

The aim here is:

Fit twenty-seven blocks, measuring A x B x C into a cubic box with sides of A + B + C.
A, B, and C must be different and the smallest dimension must be larger than (A+B+C)/4

There must be a mathematical way to work out the best approach to this but if there are then it is way way beyond my skills! I guess this might take me several months or years too - gulp!

Hopefully, I might obtain a puzzle that I can actually solve soon!