Life, The Universe, And Everything – 42

So what is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?  By now, everyone knows that the answer is 42.  This answer to the ultimate question was generated by Deep Thought well before we had all that fancy-schmancy AI crap.  And it only took 7.5 million years to compute.

Riffing on the 42nd International Puzzle Party (IPP), Joe Turner created the shapely puzzle 42 to use as his exchange puzzle at this year’s IPP.  The puzzle consists of various 2D shapes that form the digits 4 and 2.  The 6 Mahogany pieces are used to make the 4 and the 6 maple pieces are used to form a 2.  Each digit is also required to have 180 degree rotational symmetry.  The shape of each digit is provided on the cover of the box.  And to put a different slant on things, the digits are italicized.

The Maple pieces looked the easiest of the 2 so I thought that I would start there.  I spent quit a bit of time going around in circles, zig-zagging back and forth.  However, my zigs and my zags were not matching.  One would be slightly longer than another, a space would be too big, the slant was going in the wrong direction...  But after a long protracted battle ... I finally switched to the Mahogany pieces.

The Mahogany pieces reminded me of the classic T puzzle and I was hoping to have better success than with the Maple pieces.  But this one turned out to be Tough 2.  But I kept at it, basically because there were no other digits to work on.  Using my acute sense of geometry, I determined that the Mahogany pieces were pointier than the Maple.  And all these oddly angled pointy bits weren’t playing nice.  I eventually got the point and was rewarded with a nice 4.

With the first half of the challenge complete, I transitioned back to the Maple pieces.  I zig-zagged along my merry way before the epiphany that was stuck in the back of my mind finally made it’s way to the forefront.  With this new approach, I left a vast collection of malformed 2’s behind and had a nicely formed 2 to go along with the 4.

42 was certainly more challenging than I had anticipated.  I’m certainly looking forward to seeing what comes after life, the universe, and everything.