A few years ago, I received as a Christmas present a devilishly
difficult wooden puzzle. The most efficient way of packing it involves
putting it together in the "solved" position and then putting it in a
box with other assorted oddments.
It came with instructions. I saved them. I'm not sure where, though.
I've gone through the papers I *thought* it was with, and it's not
there.
The puzzle is like one of those 7-piece ones, 6 consisting of unique
4-cube shapes and the 7th a 3-cube shape, which put together make a 3 X
3 X 3 cube. If this were made of actual *cubes*, I could solve it in a
minute (well, maybe 90 seconds), and I do in fact have the documentation
that came with a regular *cube* set. This one has the base pieces
angled so that the corners are all either about 65 degrees or 115
degrees, which greatly limits the way they can be assembled together.
With 90 degree angles, there are over a million solutions; with the
65/115 solids, there are at least 2, but there might not be any more
than that.
When I took it apart, I noted the position of one of the pieces, and
I've been trying to figure it out from there, but with no success so
far, and I don't really have time to fiddle with it anymore. (We may be
moving as soon as 10 weeks from tomorrow, and there is an awful lot of
stuff that has to get done, and a baby and 2 dogs to take care of, etc.,
etc. Plus the scheduled breaks that I'll need for my sanity, and not to
be using on this problem.)
So,
1) If anyone has such a puzzle and can find the directions and would be
willing to share, please let me know.
2) If anyone knows that the solution can be found on-line somewhere and
can provide me with a URL, I'd be grateful.
3) If anyone is willing to take from me a more precise description of
each of the pieces and write a program to crunch out the solution, I'd
be extremely happy about that. (I have a vague idea about one way to do
that, but I haven't programmed anything since college and would be a
little lost on my own.)
4) If anyone has psychic powers and can tell me to a reasonable degree
of preciseness where my own @#$% instructions are, I'd settle for
knowing *that*. ;) (A reasonable degree of preciseness would lead me
to find them within 5 minutes of making the effort with this
information.)
Julia
probably going nuts, actually
