Saturday 9 September 2017

Ali Morris' Eiffel Six Cube



Apparently, I’m not the only one calling Ali names at the moment – in fact he reckons he’s going to keep a list of the interesting things he’s been called recently… it’s his own fault, really.

This is the first year that Ali has taken part in the Edward Hordern Puzzle Exchange… with an innocent looking little puzzle called Eiffel Six Cube.

He introduced it as a simple little 3*3*3 cube assembly that was so simple that even Lily, his young daughter, had managed to stumble upon a solution for it, so in order to makes things a little more “interesting” he had been forced to put an Eiffel Tower on each face, spread across pairs of pieces in order to make it “hard enough” to be an exchange puzzle… we all duly lapped up the schpiel and gave him one of our own exchange puzzles in return…

From here on I can obviously only speak for myself, but bear in mind that many others have called him interesting names as well…


I tried on a few occasions to assemble the pieces into a cube – there aren’t a lot of pieces to start with, and those Eiffel Towers definitely cut down on the number of possibilities… but finding that single assembly just kept eluding me…

I’d keep coming back to it every now and then, every time with exactly the same degree of success – nil!

I paused, and counted the bits of the towers just to be sure that there would only be one on each face as I’d been trying to achieve – tick – OK, try again…

Eventually over the past weekend I got pretty close to convincing myself it was impossible – I kept ending up at the same impossible almost-solution, I’d tried everything I could think of… and then I had one more thought, and I cursed that friendly man from London, and duly sent him a pic of the completed puzzle along with a small torrent of abuse – he’d earned it… it’s a cracking puzzle!

12 comments:

  1. I recently had some guests over, and one was solving a bunch of puzzles far too quickly. To slow him down, I presented him with Ali's puzzle. He too found all possible almost-solutions, but remained stumped, and solved no other puzzles for the rest of the visit. At the end of the evening, I reluctantly shared the solution -- I became the target of a verbal barrage. I guess I deserved it, or did I?

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    1. ...probably deserved, but well played Tyler!! :-)

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  2. Heh heh heh, this one stumped me for 4 days
    The solution is definity an Aha moment, very clever
    Theres a 4 x 4 x 4 by Ken Irvine 3.2 Migrane, another beauty too,,,,Stephen chin ( I progress to solving cubes now, woo hoo)

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    1. Excellent Chinny - it's brilliant, eh? ... and Migraine will definitely be getting it's own write-up becasue it's another super puzzle from Ken!

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  3. I think I will pass on this one....for the moment

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  4. Hello Allard,

    I see you tried to avoid "Eiffel For It" as a title for your review of this puzzle! Never mind, this one's on me, hahaha!

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    1. Lionel, with friends like you, nobody would need a troll... ;-)
      DONT.YOU'LL.START.SOMETHING.YOU.CAN'T.STOP.

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  5. You cannot stop someone who can post... and it's nice that your puzzle is not about 1000 feet tall: Just try to imagine what it would have been like to carry it back from the IPP! Back is beautiful!

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    1. I knew I should have (dis)en/couraged you.... :-)

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  6. Very clever ... I finally got it too!

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    1. ....don't you want to curse him too, George? Just a little? :-)

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    2. Yes, although after reading this blog I didn't spend too much time frustrated. BTW, If you enter this puzzle into BurrTools, it tells you it is unsolvable even without the Eiffel Towers, which serves as some sort of hint.

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