Puzzles
Below a list of some of the (physical) puzzles, I own.
Dimensions: 11.6⌀×1 cm.
In the summer of 1978, probably on Saturday, July 29, I bought
this puzzle at
Harrods in London. It is
produced by Tenyo Co.,Ltd. from Japan. It is no longer complete as one of the
pieces is missing.
On the back it says that there are at least 1,000,000 solutions. On May 20, 2009, I made mention of this puzzle when I tried finding solutions
to it by using a Exact Cover program. When I
ran a version of the program that can estimate the number of solutions, it
returned a value of about 53,326,050,000 solutions after having investigated
3,271,402 partial solutions and having found 93,535 solutions.
Dimensions: 5.7×5.7×5.7 cm
I bought my first Rubik's Cube on April 1, 1981.
This puzzle is design by Willem van der Poel. I created this puzzle myself from some wood in the
summer of 1981. The first mentioning in my (Dutch) diary is from July 16 and the last (from that year) is on Augustus 18. I made it from the design drawing given in the book
Spelen met Puzzles (Dutch for Playing with puzzles) written by
Pieter van Delft and Jack Botermans. This design can also be found on the page
Van Der Poel
3D Wooden Brain Teaser Puzzle Solution. An STL-file to print the puzzle
with a 3D printer, can be found on the page: 3D-Puzzle Van der Poel.
Dimensions: 25.7×18.3×1.3 cm
This puzzle was given to Annabel in the
summer of 2006. Solutions for this puzzle
can be found on the page Chinese
puzzle and a list of mentionings of the puzzle can be found here.
2×2×2 Rubik Cube
I bought this on July 20, 2010.
This is a regulardodecahedron 'Rubik' cube made by China Qun Jia. I bought this on July 27,
2010 at 19:52:29 for 38¥.
The Void
Dimensions: 5.7×5.7×5.7 cm
A variant of the Rubik's cube. I bought this on October 11, 2014 at 17:28 from
the toy shop Bart Smit
in Enschede (Hofpassage 19) for € 17.99.
Large wooden fractal puzzle
Dimensions: 39×36×0.6 cm
Made by Annabel on December 23, 2016 with a laser cutter. It appears that due to the fine
cutting line, the pieces easily get stuck when the are not moved exactly
parallel to each other. Getting the pieces out of the puzzle is almost harder
than to put them in. The puzzle is hanging on the wall.
Fractal puzzles
I have a number of fractal puzzles left over from the project Annabel did as
part of a 'how to start your own business' course for her major at college. I
cooperated with her to develop some
software, which she used to generate the puzzles. She created several
puzzles before arriving at the final design, which has a wooden frame and
pieces made from acrylic in various colours and can be bought from her website (in Dutch). From the experiments, I have left over the
following puzzles:
- Medium size fractal puzzle, all wood with 'double' cuts.
- Small all wooden fractal puzzle.
- Small fractal puzzle with black acrylic frame and pieces. (A bit hard to
solve because all is the same colour.)
- Set of red pieces of a small fractal puzzle.
From the final design, I have the following puzzles:
- Full set of ten small fractal puzzle with black pieces (and one green one).
- Small fractal puzzle with dark blue pieces.
- Medium sized fractal puzzle with blue pieces.
- Large size fractal puzzle with red pieces
Dimensions: 9.8×9.8 cm
Number of solutions: 89
I bought this around November 2017. For discussions about the number of
solutions to this puzzle can be found here. I named the puzzle after the HEMA chain store that sold it.
Dimensions: 9.8×9.8 cm
I bought this around November 2017 from HEMA as well. It has the same colour
as the HEMA puzzle. It is still shrink wrapped.
BiZZdesign Rubik Cubes
This is a Rubik cubes with the logo of BiZZdesign on it. The orientation of the
center pieces is significant unlike the original Rubik Cube, making this cube
a little more difficult to solve.
Two 2×3 Rubik Cubes
Dimensions: 7.5×5.1×2.5 cm
These came from some Happy Meals™ from 2018 made by
Rubik.
Dimensions: 23.9⌀×0.8 cm
Number of solutions: 1,789,051.
I bought this on July 29, 2020 from Drenth
Museum. Mentionings of the puzzle can be found here. For discussions about the number of solutions to this puzzle, look
here.
Hexagon puzzel
Dimensions: 14.6×12.8×0.95 cm
Number of solutions: 4,702.
I bought this puzzle as a present for Conny. It has a hexagon shaped frame
and has eight pieces that consist of three to five smaller hexagons. For more
information see the diary entry of April 19,
2021.
Tangram puzzle
Dimensions: 13.7×12.4×1.4 cm
On December 10, 2024, I got a tangram puzzle in the Christmas package I got
from KITT Engineering, my empolyer. It was made
by Wowlab and laser engrave with the text
'KITT Engineering 2024' and came with Tangram booklet 208 examples + solutions.
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