Puzzling Mechanics
Ever fancy yourself as an ace puzzler. Do you like mechanical puzzles? The oldest known mechanical puzzle comes from Greece and appeared in the 3rd century BC. The game consisted of a square divided into 14 parts and the aim of the game was to create different shapes from these pieces. This wasn’t as easy as it sounded!
In 1893, Professor Hoffman’s Puzzles Old and New; was effectively a catalogue of most of the mechanical puzzles available in Victorian London in the 1890s together with their solutions plus many excellent new and classical puzzle posers.
It contained, amongst other things more than 40 descriptions of puzzles with secret opening mechanisms. This book grew into a reference work for puzzle games. It had only one edition; but it went through at least two printings, as some copies are dated and some are not. The original hardback binding had two different pictorial covers that were done on four different colours.
“In an interlocking puzzle, that’s when one or more pieces hold the rest together or the pieces are mutually self-sustaining. The aim is to completely disassemble and then reassemble the puzzle. Examples of these are the well-known Chinese wood knots.
Both assembly and disassembly can be difficult in comparison to assembly puzzles, these puzzles usually do not just fall apart easily. The level of difficulty is usually assessed in terms of the number of moves required to remove the first piece from the initial puzzle.
Puzzling Puzzles
Growing up, we had wooden interlocking puzzles like the small stellated dodecahedron. It’s composed of 12 pentagrammic faces with five pentagrams meeting at each vertex. It was my personal favourite because made in wood, it had such a lovely aesthetic quality about it. You had to have a light touch with this.
I loved watching first-timers with this puzzle because shove all they liked, it required an almost imperceptible movement in the wrist and a simple gliding of the wooden faces across the others to complete it. The known history of these interlocking puzzles reaches back to the beginning of the 18th century.
I’ve seen the stellated dodecahedron made in metal too, it’s intricately and wonderfully made. It belongs to the artform called Mathematical Art. Quite stunning. Bulatov’s work as seen in this example was described as “Mathematical yet organic, these abstract forms express geometric aesthetic and beauty of shapes.” I completely agree.
More Bark than Bite
One of the more complicated-looking puzzles called a rhombic dodecahedron honeycomb had more bark than bite I thought. It’s one of the nine edge-transitive convex polyhedra, in plain speak that means it looks the same when it is viewed from different directions.
The rhombic dodecahedron can be used to tessellate (that’s when a shape is repeated over and over again covering a plane without any gaps or overlaps) 3-dimensional space. It can be stacked to fill a space much like hexagons fill a plane.
The wooden puzzle I recall spending almost its entire life undone was the Permutated Third Stellation a puzzle that resembled a nest of triangular sticks. By themselves they weren’t interlocking so some were glued together making compound pieces to create an interlocking puzzle.
The Japanese Puzzle Market
At the beginning of the 19th century the Japanese took over the market for these puzzles. They developed a multitude of games in all kinds of different shapes like animals and houses whereas the development in the western world revolved mainly around geometrical shapes. With the help of computers, it has recently become possible to analyse complete sets of games played.
This process was begun by Bill Cutler with his analysis of all the Chinese wood knots. From October 1987 to August 1990 all the 35,657 131 235 different variations were analysed. The calculations were done by several computers in parallel and would have taken a total of 62.5 years on a single computer. With shapes different from the Chinese cross the level of difficulty lately reached levels of up to 100 moves for the first piece, a scale humans would struggle to grasp. The peak of this development is a puzzle in which the addition of a few pieces doubles the number of moves.
Trends
Computer analysis however also led to another trend: since the rotation of pieces cannot, with today’s software, be analysed by computers, there has been a trend to create puzzles whose solution must include at least one rotation. These then have to be solved by hand.
Prior to the 2003 publication of the RD Design Project by Owen, Charnley and Strickland puzzles without right angles could not be efficiently analysed by computers. Stewart Coffin has been creating puzzles based upon the rhombic dodecahedron since the 1960s. These made use of strips with either six or three edges.
These kinds of puzzles often had extremely irregular components that came together in a regular shape only at the very last step. Furthermore, the 60° angles allow designs in which several objects have to be moved at the same time. The ‘Rosebud’ puzzle is a prime example of this, in this puzzle, 6 pieces had to be moved from one extreme position, in which they are only touching at the corners to the centre of the completed object.” I love a good puzzle, something completely enigmatic about it wouldn’t you say?
