Puzzle Of A Year! – 20-22

20-22 is a level 22.02 puzzle announced on Twosday, 22.02.2022, by PuzzleWillBePlayed (PWBP).   It was designed by Stéphane Chomine and consists of 2 pieces that fit within a frame.  When solved, one side shows the numerals 20 and the other 22.

I always check out the new puzzles released on PWBP and this one caught my eye and interest.  I quickly printed a copy with a gray frame and red pieces.  One piece has a 2 on each side and the other has a 2 on one side and a 0 on the other.  Of course, the frame has some internal obstructions keeping the pieces from simply sliding in.  Must be a puzzle.

This puzzle embodies several qualities that facilitate the solving process.  The first is the level.   At 22 moves, you would expect it to be non-trivial but not too hard.  The second is that the piece with a 2 on each side is the same when you rotate it 180 degrees on any axis.  That means that you can’t possibly add this piece incorrectly.  You just need to figure out which side of the frame it belongs to.  Lastly, since the piece with the 0 can go in the frame in four different ways, there are only 4 assemblies to check.  With a little experimentation, the complete pas de deux is revealed as the pieces find their final resting place.

A special thanks to all the MPD’rs that unknowingly contributed to this post.

Terrific Value in a Small Package - Mini TV

When I saw that the mad puzzler, Mr. S., wrote a post on the hefty looking 6T Burr puzzle by Alfons Eyckmans (Alfons Proves I'm Improving...), puzzle envy set in and I was looking forward to trying that level 22 puzzle someday.  As soon as I resigned myself to a long wait, the puzzlewillbeplayed site added a new level 18 puzzle by Stéphane Chomine with a similar format called Mini TV.  The size was reduced by quite a bit compared to Alfons’ 6T Burr and I decided to print a copy to play with.

Mini TV consists of a frame with 2 core pieces that run through its center and 6 mini transverse pieces that slide along the outside and impede the movement of the 2 core pieces.  I originally looked at using a 13 mm voxel size but the print time was much too long.  Changing to a 10 mm voxel dropped the print time to a mere 13 hours.

The puzzle is very approachable and not too difficult to solve.  Of course, since it was printed, it was an assembly challenge.  It takes a lot less time to solve than to print.  It took about an hour to assemble the puzzle.

Assembling the puzzle follows a series of logical steps and some experimentation.  One of the 6 transverse pieces provides a significant clue on how the core pieces need to be oriented with respect to each other.  This in turn identifies how the 2 middle transverse pieces need to be placed.  The remaining 3 pieces then provide the final clues as to the exact orientation of the 2 core pieces.  Then it’s just a matter of putting the core pieces within the frame and adding the transverse pieces one at a time until it’s all assembled.  Of course adding the first few is trivial (one is just decoration) while the last basically requires going through the complete disassembly to get to a point where it can be added.

The assembled puzzle is very attractive and like the assembly is very approachable as a disassembly challenge.  The only issue that I had with the design is that the transverse pieces have a tendency to rotate out from the puzzle when they are moved from their initial position.  You have to constantly ensure that they stay within the frame to avoid rotational shortcuts while solving.

Foreign Fame - 4 In Frame

One of my favorite puzzle designers from the other side of the pond is Stéphane Chomine.  I own quite a few puzzles designed by Stéphane but nothing close to the 648 designs (as I write this, but it increases every few days) that he has on Puzzle Will Be Played.  This particular post is about Stéphane’s puzzle, 4 In Frame.  It is #40 on Stéphane’s Puzzle Will Be Played page and was added on 3 January 2011.

I bought this puzzle from Wood Wonders in August 2017.  It was beautifully made by Brian Menold with an Ash frame and Kingwood pieces.  I really like the look of Kingwood and the end grain is spectacular.  It also contrasts nicely with the Ash.  The first thing that I did when I received it was to take it apart and then summarily forget about it.  Over the past couple of years, I’ve pulled it out for a few sessions but never managed to solve it.  Recently noticing that the puzzle was blocking the dust from settling on the china cabinet shelf, I decided that it was finally time to do something about it. 

There’s only 4 pieces that have to go in the frame, so how difficult can it be.  Like most puzzles of this type, there are those pesky blocks that are glued to the inside of the frame to frustrate the movement of the pieces.  With a difficulty level of 20.14.9.3, that’s a total of 46 moves to get the pieces in or out of the frame.  That’s a sizeable number of moves considering that there are only 4 pieces.  This puzzle doesn’t give up easily.  When taking it apart, even when it is half empty with only 2 pieces left, it still takes 9 moves to take the next one out.

According to Puzzle Will Be Played, there are 8350 assemblies and only 1 solution.  What this means is that the there are 8350 ways that the 4 pieces can be situated in the puzzle looking like the final solution, BUT only 1 of those ways can actually be realized.  I’m glad that I didn’t look up these statistics before solving the puzzle but it was obvious that those meddling blocks within the frame weren’t prohibiting any potential final resting places for the pieces - another way of saying this is that there were no easy hints as to where pieces couldn’t go.  Oh, and with 8350 assemblies, a brute force attack is not the way to go!

Having failed to solve this puzzle a couple of times in the past, I didn’t have much hope of knocking this one out quickly.  However, I was surprised to find that I was able to assemble it within a couple of hours.  For this attempt, I felt like I had, “the knack”, an innate sense of ethereal metagrobology channeling through my corporeal body.  It’s also possible that I had a bit of a head cold but it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish between these things.

I was able to look at the frame and identify where one of the pieces had to go.  From there I was able to identify where the next piece had to go and how it interacted with the first piece.  Once It was completely assembled, I marveled at the moves required to get there and aside from a couple of backtracking steps, I was amazed at how accurate I was in my assumptions.  Of course, it’s always possible that my brain was leveraging those prior failed attempts under all those cobwebs throughout the dusty gray matter.

4 In Frame is a great puzzle and I recommend it for burr puzzle collectors.  If you’re new to these types of puzzles, you may want to try a less difficult puzzle first.

I’ve Been Framed - Quadripole

Puzzles are a concoction of many things, and there are 2 things that when combined always excite me.  They are Stéphane Chomine and Brian Menold.  Combining these 2 always results in a winning combination.  They are great by themselves and even greater together.

This was once again confirmed with Quadripole from Wood Wonders.  It was designed by Stéphane in 2012 and made by Brian in 2018.  It is a level 22.9.3.2 puzzle consisting of 4 pieces captured within a frame.  The objective is to remove the pieces and then reassemble them back into the frame.  The puzzle is beautiful with Pink Ivory pieces and a Catalpa frame.

There are several things that I like about the design.  The first is the simplicity of the frame.  There are no additional fixed cubes blocking movement within the frame.  It is the same on all sides, so the orientation of the pieces to the frame doesn’t make a difference.  I consider this more elegant than frames that have internal obstructions added to increase the level of difficulty.  I also like how the puzzle only has 4 pieces that get inserted within the frame.  It makes it seem innocuous with only 4 pieces (some puzzlers never learn).

Some of you may be saying to yourself: that puzzle was released by Wood Wonders a year ago, why is he blogging about it now?  There are several reasons for that and here is the short version of that story.  After ordering the puzzle, it joined the backlog of puzzles to be solved.  I have 2 types of puzzles in my collection: those that have been solved and those that have yet to be solved.  Both sides of my collection seem to be expanding. 

Shortly after receiving the puzzle, Brian sent out an email indicating that one of the pieces may be missing a cube and if it was, he would send a replacement.  Very kind of Brian to offer to make the puzzle potentially more difficult than it already is.  This is why I like dealing with people like Brian.  Not only do you get quality workmanship, but he stands behind his work.  This prompted me to take the pieces out and examine them and sure enough, I was missing that extra cube.

After receiving the updated piece, the unassembled puzzle sat on a shelf in the dinning room for several months.  This is not unusual in our home since I like to disassemble puzzles and let them sit for a month or 2 (or 3 or 4 or 5 or … you get the picture) to provide enough time to forget anything that I may have learned from the disassembly process.  For Quadripole, I successfully remembered nothing!

After enough brain cells died off, I sat down for several hours on several occasions attempting to get this puzzle back together.  Normally, when working with the pieces, I get a sense of how they interact with each other and can put those working relationships together to form a solution.  For instance, one of the pieces could only exist within the frame with 2 orientations, so there were only two sets of potential solutions to search through.

Unfortunately, I was unable to uncover the solution by examining the piece relationships and had to resort to a brute force look at all possible piece position/orientation combinations.  While doing this, I discovered some potential relationships that I have not noticed before and soon had the pieces back in the frame.  Solved!

But wait a minute!  It felt like one the moves that I used near the end, may have required a little tilting motion to insert the final piece.  It was so minor that I checked it several times to convince myself that it was indeed a rotation.  I didn’t remember seeing any reference to a rotation and checked the box that the puzzle came in.  The nice thing about this box is that Brian included a label with a picture of the puzzle along with a description.  Sure enough, no reference to a rotation.  I also noticed that the label indicated that it takes 22 moves to remove the first piece and I didn’t feel that it took me that many moves.  Sure enough, I checked my solution and not only did it have a rotation, but it only took 14 moves to remove the first piece.

It turns out that I stumbled upon the secret 2nd solution only encountered by the mystic puzzlers of …. After I finished daydreaming, I plugged the puzzle into BurrTools to verify the stated 22.9.3.3 difficulty, and sure enough, it was quickly validated.

In the end, it looks like there are 2 solutions to Quadripole; a level 22 rectilinear solution and level 14 rotational solution.  I would have preferred that there wasn’t a second solution, but to be honest, I was in need of some level of accomplishment when I stumbled upon the rotational solution.

Thanks again to Stéphane and Brian for another fine masterpiece!

Quadripole II?

After putting Quadripole back together, I felt compelled to pull the Beta Funzzle puzzle out of the to-do pile since various references have indicated that Beta, designed by Mr. Y Gong, is similar to Quadripole.  Puzzle Master, the exclusive distributor of Beta, indicates that it is a variant of Quadripole on their website.

Funzzle Beta is made from Bamboo and is attractive enough.  Puzzle Master rates it at a level 10, which is highest on their level of difficulty and well deserved.

So how do the designs for Quadripole and Beta compare?

Quadripole (left) and Beta (right) Frames

Frame – Quadripole has a frame that is open on top and bottom and pieces can move in and out of both sides.  Beta uses a box with only the top open for pieces to move in and out although it includes a hole in the bottom to help manipulate the pieces.  The box also includes a couple of internal obstructions and some half block notching on the lip trading off elegance for additional complexity.  I did like how the top of the box had an engraving of the piece locations although there are so many moves for assembly/disassembly, it may not be that useful.

Beta (left) and Quadripole (right) Pieces

Pieces -  The Quadipole pieces are of length 4 and the Beta pieces are of length 3 although they utilize half cubes and notches, so you could say they are of length 6.  To be honest, if I hadn’t heard that one was a variant of the other, I wouldn’t have noticed a similarity.  Even after comparing the pieces, they seem dissimilar enough to me.

Complexity – As already mentioned, Quadripole has a complexity of 22.9.3.3, while Beta has a complexity of 43.4.3.3!  (No, that’s not a factorial).  That’s an impressive amount of moves to take out that first piece and it is an amazing process to go through.

Overall Design – I found the Quadripole design attractive due to the elegance of its design and at level 22, I believe that it is approachable to a large segment of the puzzle community.  Beta on the other hand trades elegance for complexity, but Oh what an amazing dance it provides.  At level 43, it may be out of the reach of many but well worth watching in Burr Tools.

I can’t recommend the mass marketed Beta puzzle because this Funzzle was not fun.  The pieces were fiddly and attempting to move them around was just frustrating.  I quickly gave up trying to solve the puzzle and entered the puzzle in BurrTools.  Even following the steps with BurrTools was frustrating with the quality of the pieces.  However, if a nicely working version ever becomes available, it may be well worth acquiring.

You can read about Kevin’s take on Beta here and Gabriels impression here.