12th June, 2006

Some weeks a go I received an email asking me for a solution for Mayer's Cube, a difficult 6-piece 4x4x4 cube assembly marketed in the UK by Pentangle.  It subsequently motivated me to have yet another go at re-assembling my Mayer's Cube.  I have finally managed it!  I was delighted! All I will say, is, reassemble the cube without the smallest 6-cube piece. Then VERY CAREFULLY slowly take it apart until you can slip the small piece into place, then reverse the steps. You may need several tries.  I now feel surprised that it took me so long, but you do need a very steady hand(s) and lots of patience.  I've had mine for several years, languishing on a shelf with a right-angled piece protruding.  Alice has always called it the periscope puzzle for this reason.

Let me know how you get on.  I am SO GLAD that I never asked anyone for detailed instructions.

I will now be endeavouring to update this page much more frequently, even if it is just a few notes about what puzzles I am working on, or taking to the pub on a Friday night.  Having a new job and a new PC suddenly makes everything much easier.

22nd March

It's been a while since I added here, but this note is just to say that the 'First Wednesday of The Month Puzzles & Magic Evenings still take place.

I hope to add more here soon.

26th Aug

The regular Puzzle Events at London's Camden Lock, near Ray Bathke's Village Games puzzle shop go from strength to strength. Ray specifies a (loosely adhered to) theme for the first Wednesday of each month, and all those attending bring related items from their own collections to try, sell, swap and show. The next event is next Wednesday, 1st September. There is a hard core of regulars, plus visits from anyone else who is in town. See here for details.   There are also magicians.

Camden Lock is one of London's most interesting and esoteric markets, set on a canal just north of central London.

25th Aug

I am trying to do more regular updates here. Let's see if I can succeed.  I am very jealous of all my puzzle friends who were in Japan and Ulan Bator, Mongolia last month. If you are reading this, I'd love to hear your stories.

After watching the Euro 2004 football, and being inspired by the design of the match ball, I designed an eight-piece puzzle, consisting of groups of hexagons and pentagons (a mixture of 4 in each group, totalling 32) which cover the surface of an inflated truncated icosahedron, better known as a football.  It is difficult, with all pieces being different. As yet nobody has solved it. I use neodymium magnets to attach the pieces.

I also designed, inspired by the above idea, a set of 9 hexominoes which tile the outside faces of a 3x3x3 cube. Also a set of 6 nonominoes, with the same goal. Both are challenging by hand. Has anyone written software that can cope with these ideas?

Another new idea has been a set of double-sided tetrominoes which must be used to tile the outside faces of a 3D pentacube. The puzzler must first cover any two faces of the target pentacube at random, and then use the 5 tetrominoes to cover the rest of the pentacube.  (The only two pentacubes with only 20 faces are the two which consist of a square tetracube with an additional unit cube.  One is the 'P' pentomino, the other isn't!) Note that the square tetromino has a cut from the middle of one edge to the centre, so that it can be folded around some corners. No overlapping is allowed.

I must be on a roll lately, another similar idea I had was to take a 2x3x4 block, add two further unit cubes, not touching each other face-to-face.  You must then cover the object with the 12 pentominoes. I have been unable to find positions for the two additional cubes which cannot be solved, although there are very few solutions for each.

I welcome any feedback on these ideas.

21st June 2005

It was with great sadness that I heard of the death of Nob Yoshigahara on Saturday.  I was with a group of puzzle friends and we were all shocked to know of his passing.  I had only known him since 1999, when we were introduced by a mutual friend, but I had known his vast and entertaining and challenging work for much longer. It was a privilege to meet him.  I subsequently met him on three continents, and was always charmed by his personality, ingenuity, and sly sense of humour.  He always had time to talk to fellow puzzlers.

To the public at large he was the designer of the highly successful puzzle game, Rush Hour, and to his many friends he was a genius without equal. Our thoughts and sympathy are with his children, and widow. We will miss you, Nob.

8th March, 2005

At the beginning of the year, I mentioned PentaPipes.  Read about them now in more detail, and enter an excellent competition.

24th Feb 2005

Kevin Holmes may not be at his puzzle stall in Covent Garden for the next few Fridays and Saturdays.

The Puzzle Meetings at Camden Lock on the first Wednesday evening of each month are going from strength to strength.

9 Jan 2004

At last I have found options for converting MS Word documents to PDF format, in the form of a free online service. I will now be adding more Free Puzzles, including my latest designs, Plaity Push, based on a puzzle idea over a hundred years old. You are required to interweave strips of card to form a specific result.  In due course there will be many different puzzles available to print, cut and solve, ranging from beginner level to wickedly hard.

6 Jan 2004

Just before Christmas I came up with a wonderful idea for a new Pentomino puzzle.  I discussed it with a couple of friends including Odette De Meulemeester.

She loved the idea and will be using it as a future competition on her site.   At the time I had not found a solution, but did eventually.  However a day later she sent me details showing that at least two other people had previously devised the same idea. I was almost in tears!

Subsequently Odette, Aad van de Wetering, and I have spent much time with this idea. It is great fun, and I will be reporting more on it in a few months' time after Odette has used the idea. I am already experimenting with taking the idea further...

This all brings me on to the general concept of inventing a new puzzle idea, only to find that someone else has beaten you to it. Heartbreaking!!  In the above example, Aad beat me by 8 years, yet even he was beaten as the idea dates back to 1978, but I am not aware of any reference to it on the Internet. Amazingly, we even both had the same name for it!

Shortly I will be adding a page which details other puzzle ideas I have had, only to find that someone had the idea first.  This has happened to me on several occasions. However, the following tale takes this concept to the zenith.

Bruno Curfs has an excellent new page about 6-piece burr puzzles, which I found while looking for information on an 18-piece burr puzzle designed by Bruce Love. Visit his site for more details but I extract an interesting anecdote:

"Eventually I designed a high level 12 burr, [12 moves to free the first piece]  ...I talked to Bill Cutler at a Dutch 'puzzle party' in the same year, and showed him my self made burr of this design. He looked at the design. He said that he had just done a complete analysis by computer of all Chinese burrs and that this design came up as the record with the highest possible level. My disappointment was somewhat tempered by his adding that this puzzle had been designed already in 1987 by Bruce Love, living in New Zealand, and this puzzle is called Love's Dozen after him. Of course I was stunned..."

I find it totally extraordinary, but quite credible, that such a complex puzzle could be designed separately on at least two occasions, but from my own experiences, I know that it happens. When I add the page discussing this concept, I will also tell another story of personally inventing AND NAMING a puzzle, only to find that both the puzzle and the name already existed.

Bruno also points out that anyone with a set of all the notchable burr pieces can also make holey burrs, in addition to the solid burrs normally detailed in such sets.
Elsewhere, I also came across an interesting article on cutting burr pieces.

5 Jan 2004

Some great puzzles are here at MicroPrizes.

(A note: Ray & Barbara's shop, Village Games, with the best stock of puzzles in the UK is open until 6pm, but ONLY FRIDAY SATURDAY SUNDAY during January.   (Normally open Wednesday to Sunday, closed Monday & Tuesday.) Map.

27 Oct

My newest design, (DemiTri, see picture above right), a 12-piece 2D packing puzzle is here. It was inspired by the software of Peter Esser, for which I am currently writing English documentation.

21 Oct

A page of links to 2D tilings and 3D packings.

14 Oct

One of my puzzle designs, Tri-Clops, is featured on the LiveCube web site. Read more about it here. Be on the lookout for bogus email headed "Internet Critical Update", it's full of nasty stuff.
Do you have the Tarquin booklet "Mathematical Origami" by David Mitchell? Read about it on my Books page, (which needs radically updating, in view of the large number of additions since I originally wrote the page.)

It is very good. Yesterday I made a rhombidodecahedron, from 12 sheets of A4 size paper.  The shape has a diameter of about nine inches and is quite robust. (Especially if you cheat and use a bit of double sided tape). The trouble with using tape is that you can't then convert it into a rhombic star by adding 12 rhombic pyramids, each made from another sheet of A4.  (With a ream (500 sheets) of paper available for as little as £3, modular origami can be a cheap activity.)

Anyway, yesterday I couldn't make sense of the instructions for making each rhombic pyramid, so it didn't really matter.  However, after a night's sleep, I tried again, and I have now got two rhombic pyramids.  Only 10 more to go, plus I'll have to fold another 12 modules (without tape!!) for the rhombidodecahedron.

With care you can make a really impressive result, with no cutting, tearing OR GLUING. You can add the rhombic pyramids individually to each module of the rhombidodecahedron, either before or after you construct the rhombidodecahedron itself. The resulting shape is about a foot in diameter.  The actual assembly is a bit of a mind-twister!

I'll shortly be starting a Modular Origami page, with pictures of the fruits of my labours.  Look for the link on the Puzzles page.

Finally, for today, I've added my latest puzzle, Watson's WreckTangles.

3rd Oct

If you are really bored try this site, and try and beat my best time of 0.27 of a second.

On a more cerebral level, on the first Wednesday of each month, Ray Bathke, proprietor of Camden Lock's Village Games puzzle shop, hosts a "Puzzles and Magic" evening at the bar above the shop in West Yard. I attended for the first time, this week.  It was wonderful fun, and a great opportunity to keep in touch with puzzlers, and meet new ones.

If you are into polyhedra, here is a 167-page collection of everything from basic Platonic solids right through to advanced stellations. It's a PDF file, so you'll need Adobe Acrobat. Print out, cut out and glue!! This seems to be a life's work!!

25th Sept

An interesting silly game or puzzle I read about in a child's book in a charity shop today is as follows. Take 15 cocktail sticks, (the sort that you get cheese on at THAT sort of party).  Take 9 sweets, I think wine gums are probably best. Then try and see how high you can build a free-standing tower, by pushing sticks into wine gums, creating a rigid geometrical structure. (There is deluxe version for barbecues where you use 15 kebab sticks and 9 cooked chicken legs.) I will feature the best pictures I receive on my site!!

Here's a load of Tetromino Fun, something I wrote months ago, and somehow forgot to upload.  The tetrominoes are so often neglected as being trivial. I try to correct that misapprehension. Also read about PentaQuads.

24th September

Firstly I've been promising Odette De Meulemeester a link here for too long, to the wonderful K.S.O. Glorieux Ronse pentomino site.

Next, have a look at my new software toy here.

I've decided I need a logo for this site!  I'm asking my visitors here to come up with a simple eye-catching design.  It should reflect the feel of the site and My Designs, or other puzzling concepts.

I'd ideally like it to include my name, Martin H. Watson, or initials, MHW.  If I receive one I really like, I'll use it extensively on the site, name you in the Site Credits and maybe even send you a small thank you.

23rd September

It appears to have been over a month since I last updated this!  I've added a web-based version of my Favourites menu here, which includes many, many recreational maths, puzzles, collectors and supplier links

I'm also revisiting POV Ray, a free 3D modelling software product. It has a steep learning curve, but I will soon be adding pictures of some of my POV-generated images. It's great for creating images of puzzle prototypes. See my Pentaballs on the My Designs page, for a preview.

I've had a 4x4x4 Rubik's Cube for many years, but it's only been recently that I have had a good look at it!! I've always been able to solve about two thirds of the standard cube, and able to complete it from one of the help books.  The middle cube on each face tells you what colour that whole face has to be. The 4x4x4 cube doesn't have a middle face!!  You have to deduce it from the colour on each of three sides of the 8 corner cubes.  This is probably no big revelation to most of my readers, but I thought I'd mention it! I am trying to get to grips with it currently.

I've been doing lots of work on the site, as many people have noticed, and kindly written with compliments. It's getting to the stage where I can sit back and actually do some puzzling, so I will be hopefully updating this page more often. Also I hope to attend the next Puzzle and Magic evening at Camden Lock, London on the first Wednesday in October, that's next week, as I write.  I will report on it here, as it will be my first visit to this regular event.

I'll also soon be adding details, to the My Designs page, of my latest puzzle, WreckTangles, an 8x8 tiling puzzle with 17 different pieces and millions of solutions.  I have yet to solve it manually myself!!  The pieces are quite fascinating.

18 August

Lots of pictures of new puzzles bought in America have been added to the My Collection page, with lots more to come. Also lots of holiday and IPP pictures.

Welcome back to my visitors from the blacked-out area from New York to Toronto.  Who stopped pedalling?

7th August

Well, we're back from Chicago and Boston, and full details of my Puzzle Party adventures will be here in a few days, meanwhile I've got a lot of puzzle cataloguing to do. It's been a bit of a shock finding that temperatures here in London are higher than in Chicago!!

Alice and I were both saddened to hear of the unexpected death last week of our good friend Ole Poul Pedersen, a puzzler from Denmark. Our thoughts are with his family.

July 15th

I spent today checking the links on nearly 4000 files, and with the exception of a few external ones (and I'll be totally redoing all pages with external links in August 2003), they are all correct, but my site statistics show that some visitors are still seeing the error page.  I think this is now fixed but please let me know if you do find a dead link. I use Xenu link checker, which I recommend.

July 14th

At long last I reveal many of my own original puzzle designs.  I still have a lot of work to do in this area, but there is now lots to entertain you. Happy Bastille Day to all my French readers. Also some puzzle humour.

July 8th

A couple of new ideas I'm working on, under the title Work In Progress.  Tell me what you think. I've added a few pictures from Recent Puzzle Events. That page will become a menu for many more pictures from those events. Finally I've added my Seven Deadly Sins puzzle to My Designs.

June 26th

The additions mentioned below (June 24th) are now linked on the Collection Index Page, along with another 40 pictures, in Chests One and Two. In an attempt to get better pictures, most of the ones in Chest Two are taken using a half-strength flash. The pictures generally look better, but I think the white background is too bright.  I'll try another colour next time.  Also, some pictures seem to have been taken before the flash recharged.

June 24th

Not yet linked to the Collection Index page, as I'm about to revise it, are about 60 new photographs of puzzles.  It's a big page so the thumbnails may take a few moments to load. I intend adding a lot more pictures in the next 2-4 weeks. I'm also totally revising and updating my links to puzzles suppliers, recreational maths, and collectors' sites.

June 21st

Two minor additions, that will get bigger are Puzzles Wanted and Puzzles Miscellany. The main change is that I have started using Mozilla Composer to create and maintain this site. Where I have used MC I have marked the page at the foot. The implication of this change is that life is a lot easier and hopefully I will be adding a lot more, and more often.

May 21st

Is it really this long since I last did a major update here? Clearly so.  I’ve been working on other parts of the site, particularly the Picture Gallery, but there are no puzzle pictures there. I’m slowly changing the font to this new Helvetica 14pt. About a year ago I featured Baffle Ball as my Puzzle of the Month, and I subsequently got an enquiry about obtaining one. I told my correspondent that they were very hard to come by, but at Easter I managed to obtain one for him. I’m always happy to look out for a particular wanted puzzle. Contact me. On the subject of Puzzle of the Month, due to pressures of job seeking, this has not been updated recently, but this will soon be rectified. I will also try and catch up on my correspondence, so if you’ve written and not received a reply, I will get back to you soon.

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