VeryPuzzle presents: Snow Mystery

Leslie Le · **Posted:** Tue Aug 14, 2012 9:19 am

Dear Puzzlers,

This is an intuitive twisty puzzle that can be introduced to almost anyone.

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Simple strategy is enough to solve it.

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Package & samples

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Just another light weight toy.

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Size: 80mm(diamater)*14mm(height).

DEALERS: feel free to request a sample from us. It will be available for purchase within 30 days.

EDIT(2012-08-20)
We have started to accept bulk orders. The online time will be 9th Sep. You are welcome to send enquires.

Models: black/white with stickers(DIY version), black/white with solid colored plastics(Solid Colored Version). There's no pictures for models other than black DIY version, currently.

Enjoy!

Leslie

otischeng · **Posted:** Tue Aug 14, 2012 10:03 am

Seems like a kind of Dihedral puzzle. Like UFO? I like it's outlook~It's good looking. May be a very simple puzzle~Who cares? I like colorful puzzle!

A J · **Posted:** Tue Aug 14, 2012 10:08 am

Congratulation. Nice puzzle!

Melysa · **Joined:** Thu Nov 05, 2009 7:30 pm **Location:** New York

I want one! :mrgreen:

HeX · **Posted:** Tue Aug 14, 2012 10:27 am

When I saw the thread on recent post, I thought another large puzzle... and I never expected a cute looking puzzle.

Doug Roth · **Joined:** Sun May 29, 2011 2:56 pm **Location:** New York

Cool!

-Doug

Jared · **Posted:** Tue Aug 14, 2012 12:34 pm

It is very nice, but I think it looks best with no center sticker.

bmenrigh · **Posted:** Tue Aug 14, 2012 12:49 pm

This is one of those puzzles where a very careful solve by a human should be able to come very close and sometimes match "god's number".

I'm not entirely sure what the back of the puzzle looks like but assuming it's the same as the front and that there are two copies of each colored "antler" piece, this puzzle should have:

? 6 * (12! / (2! ^ 6))
% = 44906400

Total distinguishable states. Even though this puts in roughly on-par with the Ufo and Hockey Puck puzzles, it's much easier to solve.

Jorbs3210 · **Posted:** Thu Aug 16, 2012 5:28 pm

Are you planning on making these available in bulk? I'd love to give these out for people who donate a certain amount to a charity we're running at school due to some students getting in an accident together and requiring major surgery.

bmenrigh · **Posted:** Thu Aug 16, 2012 8:33 pm

I computed all the positions for this puzzle (face-turn-metric):

Code:

0        1
1        5
2        30
3        225
4        1225
5        6701
6        33425
7        150851
8        598647
9        2051566
10       5691316
11       11537290
12       14618568
13       8699902
14       1503894
15       12750
16       4
Total:   44906400

So "god's number" on this puzzle is 16. I might compute the table for quater-turn-metric too (actually 1/6th turns of the disk).

Melysa · **Joined:** Thu Nov 05, 2009 7:30 pm **Location:** New York

Jared wrote:

It is very nice, but I think it looks best with no center sticker.

I second that. :mrgreen:

BN · **Joined:** Thu Sep 16, 2010 4:35 am

Looks like a great addition to the collection.
On a side note, seems like those stickers in the back of the first picture could have been arranged more optimally.

eye2eye · **Posted:** Thu Aug 16, 2012 9:09 pm

This looks like a really cool, simple puzzle.
Can the first person to get and solve this post a picture saying "sNOw mystery here!"?

bmenrigh · **Posted:** Fri Aug 17, 2012 12:28 am

Alright I computed the quarter-turn-metric for this puzzle too.

Code:

                                                                           FACE TURN METRIC
            0        1        2        3        4        5        6        7        8        9        10        11        12        13        14        15        16     Qtotals
  0         1                                                                                                                                                                  1
Q 1                  2                                                                                                                                                         2
U 2                  2       12                                                                                                                                               14
A 3                  1       12       54                                                                                                                                      67
R 4                           6       78      184                                                                                                                            268
T 5                                   63      448      686                                                                                                                  1197
E 6                                   24      368     2206     2274                                                                                                         4872
R 7                                    6      204     2131     9456     7484                                                                                               19281
  8                                            21     1376    11664    36701    22276                                                                                      72038
T 9                                                    236     7052    56695   130192    59988                                                                            254163
U 10                                                    60     2343    33197   230920   418372    141000                                                                  825892
R 11                                                     6      612    13696   147740   801364   1144032    271896                                                       2379346
N 12                                                             24     3036    58387   569454   2302700   2441892    380928                                             5756421
  13                                                                      42     9096   184416   1667122   4967984   3570076    309616                                  10708352
M 14                                                                               36    17952    412638   3267746   6883710   2778354     87288                        13447724
E 15                                                                                        20     23788    571568   3433756   4170880    617126      1212               8818350
T 16                                                                                                  36     16204    344130   1357992    647204      5740               2371306
R 17                                                                                                                    5968     81652    149192      4784         4      241600
I 18                                                                                                                              1408      3084      1006                  5498
C 19                                                                                                                                                     8                     8
  Ftotals:  1        5       30      225     1225     6701    33425   150851   598647  2051566   5691316  11537290  14618568   8699902   1503894     12750         4    44906400

That'll probably wrap on your monitor so attached is a screen shot as well as the ASCII table.

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GuiltyBystander · **Posted:** Fri Aug 17, 2012 6:45 am

What do those hardest positions look like?

bmenrigh · **Posted:** Fri Aug 17, 2012 3:11 pm

GuiltyBystander wrote:

What do those hardest positions look like?

Well first I should say I've been assuming something that may not be true. That is, I've assumed that the color order for the front of the puzzle is the same as the back and each antler / branch has the same color on both sides. It's clear from the pictures that the coloring is not the same but I can't tell if it isn't the same across puzzles or it isn't the same front-to-back on the same puzzle.

The coloring of the puzzle in the solved position has some impact on the tables I've generated. There are 120 distinct colorings with 6 unique colors, 6 on the front and 6 on the back. I can generate the table for all of them but it'll require that I make my program more efficient.

So going by my assumption that the front and the back have the same colorings, I'd describe the solved state with the string "0AABBCCDDEEFF" where 0 is the twist of the top center piece (can be in {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5}) and AA is the front A color and back A color on the same antler.

The 4 hardest face-turn-metric positions are:
1DDEEFFAABBCC
1EEFFAABBCCDD
5CCDDEEFFAABB
5DDEEFFAABBCC

And the 8 hardest quarter-turn-metric positions are:
1ACDDCEFFEABB
1CCBDEEDFAAFB
1FBAABDCCDFEE
1FFACBBCEDDEA
5AEFFCABBECDD
5BBCADDECFFAE
5BFCCDBEEFDAA
5EEBFAADBCCFD

Leslie Le · **Posted:** Mon Aug 20, 2012 6:43 am

Thank you guys for accepting this intuitive puzzle. One of our expectation is to share puzzles with more than just experts.

@Jared: I prepared 6 colors only when making these samples, while actually we will provide 10 colors. Probably a center sticker with the 7th color will be fine.

@Jorbs3210: Definitely. Actually we've started accepting bulk orders now and I've updated the original post. We think it might be a neat gift to friends of puzzlers or an introduction to your hobby.

@bmenrigh: Thank you for doing the programming job, that's great and informative. I'm wondering, however, it has a "god's number" of 16 which is not quite far from 22(the number of 333 cube?). But Snow Mystery is much easier to solve , haha

stardust4ever · **Posted:** Tue Aug 21, 2012 1:28 pm

An intuitive way to solve this puzzle would be to match the first 5 antler on the front side, and use the sixth antler as a placeholder to shuffle the antlers to their corresponding sides on the back. Once you've matched five colors on both sides, the puzzle is solved, assuming the puzzle uses a 6-color scheme. Even with a 12-color scheme, with five antlers solved on both sides, there are only two possibilities left, requiring at most a half turn of the last antler.

Because it is possible to swap two pieces without disturbing the rest of the puzzle (just rotate an antler), there is no parity error to get hung up with at the end of a solve.

Expert Mod: I have an idea on how one could make an "expert" version of the puzzle: Since the antlers are nicely symmetric, it may be possible to "split" each antler piece precisely down the center, which would create four quarter pieces which rotate in 90 degree increments instead of two halves which rotate only 180 degrees. If the mechanism is simply just a rotating grommet holding the antlers in, and the tolerances are tight enough, the puzzle may be able stay together with 90 degree rather than 180 degree shapes. By mixing 180 and 90 degree rotations, the puzzle would be allowed to "shapeshift". Since the antler fragments now come in chiral pairs, this would add a certain of difficulty just getting the snowflake back into a flattened "pancake" state, rather than just a shape-shifted mess.

puzzle_weaver · **Joined:** Sun Mar 25, 2012 7:12 pm

I love how this puzzle looks. So simple looking. Only one question though: how much will it cost?

Jared · **Posted:** Wed Aug 22, 2012 8:11 am

Less than a Tuttminx, I hope. :lol:

fhw · **Joined:** Mon Oct 03, 2011 5:59 am

nice

Leslie Le · **Posted:** Thu Aug 23, 2012 11:44 pm

Jared wrote:

Less than a Tuttminx, I hope. :lol:

Well... A classical tuttminx is worth at least 5 of Snow Mystery's, just think about the number of colors.

bmenrigh · **Posted:** Thu Aug 23, 2012 11:47 pm

Hi Leslie,

Can you tell us a bit about how you sticker the puzzles? Is every puzzle stickered exactly the same or do you let each puzzle have a different color scheme?

Also, is the front and the back stickered the same way? That is, for each branch, is it pink on both sides or blue on both sides, etc?

iamacuber · **Joined:** Thu Jul 05, 2012 1:16 am

Wow that looks very cool. I am just curious as to what it would be classified as. I was thinking it is a little like a 2x2x6, the 2's are the twisting of the two snow flake sides and the 180 degree turning of the antler pieces, and the six would be the six different antler pairs? Any ideas? I am probable wrong. :roll:

It does look funny and i also think it looks better without the center stickers.

bmenrigh · **Posted:** Fri Aug 24, 2012 8:07 pm

iamacuber wrote:

I am just curious as to what it would be classified as. I was thinking it is a little like a 2x2x6, the 2's are the twisting of the two snow flake sides and the 180 degree turning of the antler pieces, and the six would be the six different antler pairs? Any ideas? I am probable wrong. :roll:

I'd classify it as dihedral and not try to draw a specific analogy to a cuboid.

You could make this puzzle out of a hexagonal prism if each face was very shallow and curvy-cut so that there is no overlap between the cuts on each face.

looking at Jaap's page, it's very similar to the Tricky Disky / Triple Disky / Ufo/Varia-Disk.

Edit:
Also, the puzzle is a subset of Luke's Hexoid. Specifically it's a sticker variation of just the two hex centers and the 12 triangles touching the centers, 6 on each side.

Leslie Le · **Posted:** Sat Aug 25, 2012 6:55 am

bmenrigh wrote:

Hi Leslie,

Can you tell us a bit about how you sticker the puzzles? Is every puzzle stickered exactly the same or do you let each puzzle have a different color scheme?

Also, is the front and the back stickered the same way? That is, for each branch, is it pink on both sides or blue on both sides, etc?

Actually there are two cases. The DIY set contains 10 color sticker set and will not be stickered. Solid colored version, however, will be all alike. Both sides of 'Y' branches use the same color by default.

iamacuber · **Joined:** Thu Jul 05, 2012 1:16 am

Yeah, after I wrote it I did not think it was the best analogy, oh well.
The puzzle looks very cool, any idea when it will be available?

Melysa · **Joined:** Thu Nov 05, 2009 7:30 pm **Location:** New York

I just got mine like 5 minuets ago. And I am very happy with it. I was expecting it to be bigger though.

VeryPuzzle presents: Snow Mystery

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