Limited Edition Released December 2009

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Puzzles by Maker > Mr Puzzle Limited Edition wooden puzzles > Limited Edition Released December 2009 - 3 Sets of 30

Three different puzzles. Only 30 of each puzzle will ever be made in each Limited Edition set. Made by Brian Young @ Mr Puzzle.
The 2009 Annual Series of Limited Edition puzzles conforms to Brian’s stated goal of adding puzzles not generally or commercially available to his own puzzle collection. Puzzles are chosen for either historical significance and aesthetic value, not necessarily degree of difficulty although there's nothing too easy about any of this year's puzzles.

Ternary Burr Designer: Goh Pit Khiam
Although Brian always says he does not just make puzzles because they are very difficult the Ternary Burr is certainly that; maybe the hardest burr he’s ever had to make. Certainly the level of difficult to solve is amazing, putting them together with the solution takes a long time, and then there’s the challenge of actually making the pieces Pit came up with.

Minatour Burr Designer: Frank Potts

Is it a burr or is it a maze? It looks like a 3 piece burr until you start trying to separate the pieces and find yourself manipulating a maze. The design of the pieces of this puzzle took Brian way outside his comfort zone as a woodworker when he decided the centre maze pieces should to be waterjet cut from aluminium and the third piece required a very strong polycarbonate rod to manipulate the maze.

The Flying Puzzle Designer: Dries De Clercq
And it’s not all just burrs. Brian also chooses puzzles for aesthetic value and sheer enjoyment of playing with them. This elegant table top version of two of The Flying Puzzle problems will invite anyone who sees it to play with the puzzle. It must be solvable, after all there are only 3 basic pieces and 3 basic rules.

The Flying Puzzle

LIMITED EDITION of 30 puzzles released 27th November 2009

Status:  4th February 2010. We have twelve of these puzzles still available.

Brian first encountered Dries's designs when he spent many puzzling hours trying to solve Dirk Weber's Exchange Puzzle from IPP28 in Prague. This inspired him to contact Dries who then told him he had designed another 20 versions of his new slant on the original idea of what a sliding block puzzle should be.

What got Brian so interested was the supposed simplicity of the puzzle.
> Very few pieces, just three.
> Very few rules, just three.
      1. Start with blocks in the starting position marked.
      2. Move only one block at a time into any position it will fit.
      3. End with the block in the finishing position marked.

The puzzle is chosen from a series called "Flying Block Puzzles" designed by a Belgian named Dries De Clercq. To date Dries has designed no less than 21 levels of this puzzle. Brian has chosen two of the harder puzzles; the same set of two "T"s and one "L" make a different puzzle on each side of the puzzle frame.

Dries says, "I love to make hard puzzles with simple rules and Flying Block Puzzles are exactly like that! They look so simple. Only 3 blocks and 1 simple rule. But they're not! The idea came up when I tried to find an alternative to sliding block puzzles."

The double sided puzzle tray is made from Red Meranti. This wood from the Shorea family grows widely throughout tropical Asia, ranging from India to the Philippines and South to Papua New Guinea and Eastern Indonesia.   The pieces are made from: "T" – Queensland Silver Ash "L" - Papua New Guinean Ebony "T" – Papua New Guinean Rosewood. The small knobs are made from stainless steel with decorative pewter collars.
Size of puzzle tray is: 180mm x 210mm x 20mm

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The Minotaur's Burr

LIMITED EDITION of 30 puzzles released 27th November 2009

Status: 30th November 2009.  0 puzzles left for sale.

In Greek mythology King Minos built a complex maze-like construction to hold the Minotaur. So what does that have to do with solving a 3 piece burr?

This design was created in 2008 by Frank Potts. Frank was inspired by the 3D maze in Oskar’s Cube. With his love of burr puzzles he wanted to design a maze that could then be disassembled and reassembled inside a burr with a minimum of pieces.

The result is this very elegant puzzle with just 3 pieces. How hard can a 3 piece burr be to disassemble and reassemble?

Each piece of the puzzle is very complex and Brian was concerned that wood would not be strong enough for the construction of the maze and so began the process of sourcing not only a stronger material, but one that could be very accurately cut.

The final product is made from a combination of wood, aluminium and polycarbonate.

The wooden cube ends are made from Western Australian Jarrah. Brian spent a lot of time laminating them with Jarrah veneer to give the finished puzzle a smooth modern look, but this does hide the amount of effort that went into harmonising the different materials into a single piece. Two of the burr pieces have centre mazes which are waterjet cut from 25mm aluminium laminated to wooden ends, the third has a very strong polycarbonate rod joining the wooden ends.

Size of each piece is: 150mm x 50mm x 50mm
Solution: BurrTools file can be supplied when you buy the puzzle.

Price:

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Ternary Burr

LIMITED EDITION of 30 puzzles released 27th November 2009

Status: 30th November 2009.  0 puzzles left for sale.

There are 22 pieces to this extremely difficult caged burr puzzle designed by Goh Pit Khiam. You'll get a feel for just how difficult it is if you watch Brian put it together on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKavWv3Jin8.  It took him until he was putting the last one together to get the courage to video it. By this time he had learnt to do it without the BurrTools computer animated solution and do it in about 5 mins. The first one took me a lot longer... a lot... at least 30 minutes with the computer!

Pit Khiam was playing with Bill Cutler’s Binary Burr (First Prize: IPP Design Competition 2003) and wondered whether the ternary idea in Marcus Götz’s Crazy Elephant Dance (see the puzzle) puzzle could be adapted for a burr.   After designing several prototypes, Ternary Burr was born. His initial designs allowed for only the key piece to be removed but this final design allows the cage to be disassembled as well once the “ring” pieces are removed.

Pit Khiam determined that the number of moves to remove the key piece for a simple "4 ring" puzzle is 75 based on these complex mathematical expressions.   Let T_n be the minimum number of moves to remove the key piece for a puzzle with n “rings”. T_n can be defined recursively as T_n = 3T_n-1 – 2T_n-2 + 4  This leads to the following explicit expression for T_n: T_n = 6(2ⁿ) – 4n – 5

Complex mathematical theory aside - all we know is that it takes no less than 97 steps to completely disassemble this very difficult interlocking burr puzzle. That is 75 moves to remove the “bar”, and an additional 22 steps to completely disassemble the frame and the "4 ring" pieces.

A Chinese Ring Puzzle, a puzzle with a binary solution, with just 4 rings takes just 10 moves to complete so you can see that adapting the concept to a ternary puzzle in this way has significantly increased the difficulty.

The puzzle is made from Papua New Guinean Rosewood. The box is made to fit firmly. The 5 main working pieces (rings & key) are purposely made to move freely.   These are very complex pieces and Brian did not want any doubt that force might be required; because it definitely is not.
Size: 130mm x 100mm x 100mm

Solution: BurrTools file can be supplied when you buy the puzzle.

It seems Pit was also out to test the maker's woodworking skills. Brian jokingly says “he must have thought of the most abstract notched pieces he could think of and then designed the puzzle around them”.

There are over 90 check-outs and routed grooves to make the puzzle, many of which were milled from a single piece to minimise glue joints. Where Brian did have to glue pieces he tried to use it to strengthen the piece by laminating the wood.

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