Reminds me of the Bedlam Cube. The solved state seems pretty straightforward though..

Is this legit Rubik's and is there any word on the release date/price?


Also, I like how the "scrambled" solution still adheres to the colour scheme

Yeah, it does look like a Bedlam cube. Also a 3D version of an arcade game I can't remember.

Tetris?

ThinkFun also do something similar called "Block By Block", but this looks way cooler and better quality, based on the well-known Rubik's Cube design, although it's probably much easier as the colours give away the orientation of each piece in the final solution.

It's not a new idea but it looks good. I don't like the Bedlam Cube guy because he said it's better than the Rubiks Cube.

Alex

It reminds me of Rubik's Bricks.

Skarabajo.

Just went to MegaHouse's site, it'll be out soon-ish and the price is 1554Y so around 16USD I guess.

That actually looks quite fun!

Is that on the left an *official* 1x1x1 Rubik's Cube???




Pantazis

OMG your right! I'm going to buy that puzzle just for that one cubie!

Thanks for posting this. I was about to do the same thing but with 4x4 and 5x5 size cubies. Glad I didn't start.

Could someone translate the text for us? Some of us can't read Japanese..

It's easier than bedlam cube / soma cube / tetris cube because each piece has a visible orientation.

If these are the same size as 3x3x3 cubies then this will be a great source of parts for modders

But,...why? Why sticker like that? The color scheme is wrong.
I admit personally that the person who made this is used to old cubes.

Not at all. With no color constraints, and that piece set, it would be a very easy puzzle. Adding the color constraints vastly cuts down the number of solutions.

It might still be easy; it's hard to judge without trying it. But I don't think adding the colors makes it easier. It seems to me to be a creative new way to add interest to the Soma-style packing puzzle. But then I'm not familiar with the Bedlam cube.

Edit -- hmm, easy enough to build with LiveCube and find out...

... confirmed. With no color constraints, it's trivial. With the color constraints, it didn't take me all that long, maybe 5 minutes. I don't know whether there's more than one solution.

Looks really useful for modifications.

Looks like it could be fun! I'm exited! Any idea on the release date?

Interesting choice of pieces - they're all 'flat' (solid) polyominoes even though the pieces with four or five cubes could be three dimensional.

The monomio, two dominoes with different colouring, the I tromino and two L trominoes with different colouring, the L and T tetrominoes and the F/R pentomino.

Shame about the blue opposite white colour scheme. I wonder if they'll make a BOY version for Europe?

The images suggests that there's at least 2 solutions. I'd assume there's more. I'd like, similar to Block by Block, that there are images that tell us what to do.

They should make the tranparent box like a Rubik's Cube, and then you put the cubie bits in randomly, and then solve it. Now that would be a puzzle.

Of course, some of us disagree, and compulsively resticker puzzles we receive which are done in the horribly uncouth BOY scheme.

Why do you say that??? Unless you're getting that from the Japanese, I don't see anything to suggest more than one solution.

It would be easy enough to find out via BurrTools, of course.

BTW the pieces are evidently all flat so as to enable planar puzzles (like the 3x9 layout) as well.

^



The puzzle is shown in two states here, and still solved. Now, whether this is actually possible with the puzzle itself isn't definite since the 2nd image is a computer graphic. I think it's safe to assume it can be solved without being "solved".

I hope that made sense..

But again, I stress that somebody translates the Japanese in the event that those who can't read it are missing something important, please?

If it's not done later tonight, I'll see if one of my friends can do it.

I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. By "solved" I meant assembled into a 3x3x3 cube with correct coloring; I don't think that's what you mean. It's trivial to assemble into a cube if you don't care about coloring; it's not even a puzzle.

I guess I don't see the point of the 3x9 layout... it's trivial to make that if you don't care about coloring, and impossible if you do.

However! At first I thought you meant that the two partially assembled images in the plastic box represented two different solutions. It hadn't occurred to me that those would be almost solved -- why show the user the solution? -- but in fact they are; it's easy to see how to place the remaining pieces. But, those two photos show the same solution, rotated by 90°.

However! My solution is different. So there are indeed multiple solutions for packing into a 3x3x3 cube respecting coloring.

Yes that's what I mean I'm pretty sure it would be more of an educational toy in that respect, but it would still be considered a puzzle, I think.

Hmm, maybe so... it's one puzzle for very young kids, and another puzzle for everyone else. Nice.

I use to own a Soma cube, though I lost all the pieces to it.

With this kind of puzzle, the most challenging member of the set would probably have the following characteristics:

1. Several unique pieces.
and
2. A sole configuration that produces a cube(without regards to coloration).

There exist many puzzles of this type that satisfy one or the other, but if any satisfy both, I do not know.

As for this particular puzzle, I would think the colors would be a HUGE hint even if there is only one solution where all sides are a single color. Of course, the real challenge would be to manually find EVERY configuration that produces a cube, classified by the external pattern.

According to Wikipedia, a Some cube has 240 solutions for building a Cube, not counting reflections and rotations. I would imagine that a Checkered Soma cube or a "Rubik's" Soma Cube would have fewer solutions respecting a "solved" finish.

3D puzzle
• very difficult ••• complete 6 faces
• difficult ••• complete 1 face
• challenging ••• colors don't matter
2D puzzle
• 3x9 2D puzzle ••• 3x9 shape
• Silhouette puzze ••• Diverse challenging shapes

Yes, there are several. One that was once popular is Coffin's Half-Hour Puzzle. Supposedly you're doing well to solve it in under half an hour -- it is indeed pretty hard. Here's a nice summary of such puzzles (including the piece set for the Half-Hour Puzzle):

http://www.johnrausch.com/PuzzlingWorld/chap03a.htm

More recently, Bram has set himself the task of designing the hardest possible such 3x3x3 dissection, for numbers of pieces ranging from 4 to 9. He's sent them to me; some of them are very hard, definitely harder than the Half-Hour Puzzle (which really surprised me). Perhaps he'll share them here?


For some puzzles (e.g. Bram's) that would indeed be a huge hint, but for this one, no; it is trivial without the color constraints, and a bit of a puzzle if you add them. The 1x1x1 and two 1x1x2 pieces are just too flexible otherwise, almost any partial assembly works.

I don't know if I would agree with this:


... unless I just got lucky. As I mentioned, it took me about 5 minutes. But then they also call the unconstrained problem "challenging", which is a joke.

Hang on, I certainly don't agree that adding the colours makes it more difficult on the basis that the 1x1x1 single cubie would have too much flexibility otherwise; maybe the 2x1x1, but not the single cubie: If you're left with a single space then you can put the 1x1x1 single cubie in any orientation you want!

In fact for each piece that you add colours, the puzzle becomes 24 times easier, provided the total number of possible solutions does not change. So for say 10 coloured pieces, the puzzle would be 24^10 times easier if the total number of solutions is the same. You would need to reduce the number of possible solutions by at least a factor of 24 for each piece that you colour, in order to make the puzzle more difficult overall.

Ah, OK, right. But the 1x1x2s do make it more much flexible. Basically, there are many, many more possible solutions if you don't have the coloring.

For something like the Half-Hour Puzzle, or Bram's puzzles that I mentioned, where there's only one solution anyway, then adding the coloring would make them much easier, because it would drastically cut down the search space. Here, the search space is cut down because each piece has a fixed orientation, but the solution space is cut down even more. (That's a nice design trick that I don't recall seeing in this type of puzzle before, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's not new.) If you have a set of LiveCube, just try it; you'll see.

The Japanese text also says that solving all 6 sides is harder than solving it without regard to color.

I just added a paragraph to my last post while you replied. Hope that makes sense. It actually fits with what you said, just a bit more mathematical/quantified. The magic number is 24, because that's how many possible orientations any one piece can have without the colours.

Well, for this puzzle there are 9 pieces. We might as well fix the orientation of one of them, say the F-pentomino. The 1x1x1 has only one unique orientation anyway; the 1x1x2s and 1x1x3 each have three, and the T and short L shapes each have 12 (because of mirror symmetry). That leaves only the long L with 24 orientations. So the actual reduction factor in possible places you can put pieces, when you add the coloring constraint, is

24 x 12 x 12 x 12 x 3 x 3 x 3 = 1,119,744,

or about 10^6, much less than 24^10.

This is not exactly a measure of the relative size of the effective search spaces, however, because each new piece you place is constrained by the placements of existing pieces. One way to get a reasonably meaningful measure of the relative sizes of the search space would be to look at the number of legal partial assemblies in each case. I would bet that if you did that, the ratio of partial assemblies of the unconstrained version relative to the constrained version would wind up much less than 10^6.

Would that new number then be smaller than the ratio of the number of solutions in the two cases? I would guess so, but I'm not positive. (The latter number could be gotten from BurrTools, if anyone wanted to know it.)

But in any case, in practice, I can assure you that the unconstrained problem is trivial, and the color-constrained problem is not.

The literal translation of "チャレンジステップ" is "challenge step". Maybe it simply means an "entry step". Since I'm not a native English speaker either, I didn't know "challenging" is more difficult than "difficult" or "very difficult".

Sorry for the confusion

There is no rule for whether the borrowed word "challenge" means more or less difficult than native words which mean "difficult".

There is a rule for whether the borrowed word "challenge" is more or less challenging than native words which mean "difficult". Since it's a borrowed word it's challenging for older people who grew up before this word was borrowed. But since it's written in katakana it can be pronounced by children who haven't learned Kanji yet.

In principle I consider this a children's toy, more puzzling than Rubik's Snake, but still a children's toy.

The official 1x1x1 makes it interesting though. I just hope Rubik didn't infringe on Verdes' patents

Don't forget the official 0x0x0 next to it.

The puzzles of mine which Bob mentioned went up today, you can see them here, they're the ones named 'BestX' for x from 3 to 12 (except 11) -

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~rh5k-isn/Pu ... /Cohen.xml

Enforcing orientations is an interesting idea. It makes the puzzle much easier than the corresponding size puzzle which allows reorientations, but the kinds of logic used to approach it are very different. I'd start my analysis by starting with observations like 'this piece fills 3 voxels on one layer and 1 on the next' and work that out for all pieces and figure out what layers they could be on so that each layer has exactly nine voxels filled, then do that for each of the three directions, and work from there.

Brilliant, I would never have thought of that!

Is it possible that the colors on each piece do not exactly mirror the cube?

Im pretty sure its japanese

I knew it!

Actually, in 1982 Ideal published a board game called "Rubik's Race" and it included a "Scrambler" that had 9 tiny 1x1x1 cubes inside.

Picture of Rubik's Race from Board Game Geek.

Close-up of the Scrambler from Joe Barbercheck's dice collection.

Back on topic: I don't mind the blue opposite white colour scheme, it reminds me of my first cube and a time when the last layer was always blue. Can't wait to get this new "puzzle".

Skarabajo.

I'd hate to think of what the puzzle will look like when all those pretty PET stickers get scuffed due to sliding back and fourth against each other.

Rubik's 1x1x1: The toughest puzzle in the world to scramble!

That's was I was thinking. I can't wait for all these new puzzles to come out. There goes my wallet...

Well in that case.....ITS THE NEW OFFICIAL RUBIK'S 1x1 V2!!!!!!!!!!

Sorry for the bump...

I just got this and loved making shapes. They give four puzzle images to do...


"A Top"
It took me the longest to do.


"Flower"
2 minutes (guessing)


"Dog"
1 try under a minute


"Police Car"
About 3 minutes