Rubik's Cube

In my 10th post, I shall introduce to the readers, the best selling puzzle of all time, the Rubik's Cube.

The puzzle in solved and scrambled form.
Rubik's Cube is a type of mechanical puzzle in a 3x3x3 cube, with 6 sides of the cubes covered by 9 stickers. Each face will have different colour, forming a total of 6 different colours on the cube. All the 6 faces of the cube can be turned independently.

The aim of the puzzle is to turn the layers of the cube, and try to restore it from scrambled back to solved form.
Feel free to play around with the cube by clicking this link.
There are lots of method for solving this puzzle, the most common method is the layer-by-layer (LBL) method, because it is a beginner's method, so most people start learning this method first, before moving on to more advanced methods.

The activity of trying to solve the puzzle as quick as possible is known as speedcubing or speedsolving. The current world record of Rubik's cube single solve in an official competition is 6.65 seconds, held by Feliks Zemdegs from Australia. The previous record was 6.77 seconds, which was hold by Feliks himself as well. The record was set on 28th January 2010, so I had edit the post, to update my readers with the latest record.
Watch the world record solve in the video below:


History of Rubik's Cube
The cube was invented by a Hungarian sculptor and professor of engineering, Ernő Rubik in 1974. The puzzle was originally called Magic Cube, and being sold by Ideal Toys in 1980, under the license by Rubik, and won the German Game of the Year special award for Best Puzzle in the same year.
Over 350 millions of the cube have been sold worldwide as of January 2009, making the cube as the top selling puzzle.
Initially, the cube was used by Rubik as a teaching tool, to help his students understand more about 3D objects. He realized it is a puzzle only when he started playing around with the cube, and found it very hard to restore the cube after scrambling it.

Burr Puzzle

In this post, I shall talk about a type of interlocking puzzle called Burr puzzle.

Burr puzzle consists of at least 3 rods, which intersecting with each other at right angles. The most common and famous type is the 6 piece burr, where there are 3 sets of two rods intersecting with each other.
The way to solve this puzzle is first figuring out how to remove the first piece from the complete puzzle, and then the second piece, and finally the whole puzzle, and then try to restore the pieces back to the whole puzzle again.

Watch this video on assembling of a 6 piece burr puzzle:

Assembling of a 24 piece burr puzzle:


History of burr puzzle
Only little is known about the puzzle's early history, however it is certain that the puzzles were produced in Europe and Asia as early as the 18th century. The 6 piece burr puzzle were shown in toy catalogs as early as 1803. In 1928, Puzzles in Wood, a book devoted to the burr puzzle was published by Edwin Wyatt.
Burr puzzle used to known as 'Chinese' puzzle, due to mass production of the puzzle in the Orient since early 1900s, however, there is no evidence to show that the puzzle originated from there.
The puzzle got its name as burr puzzle from Wyatt, because the puzzle looks like a seed burr.

Tangram

After talking about jigsaw puzzle in my previous post, I would like to introduce another tiling puzzle to my readers, Tangram, also known as 七巧板 in Chinese.

Usually, the puzzle consists of seven flat pieces, called tans. All the 7 pieces can be put together to form shapes. The aim of the puzzle is to form a specific shape based on the outline or silhouette given, with all 7 pieces, and the pieces are not allowed to overlap with each other.
Try the puzzle out by clicking this link.

History of Tangram
The puzzle originated from China. Earliest known book in China is dated 1813, but the puzzle was invented even before that, therefore the date of invention of tangram is unknown.
The puzzle was spread across Europe and America during the 19th century, this is due to the opening up of trade with China. Lots of books and picture card sets of the puzzle were released. Tangram continues to entertain people until today.

Jigsaw Puzzle

My blog readers, in this post, I'll talk about 1 of the most popular puzzles you can find today, Jigsaw Puzzle.

The aim of this puzzle is straight and clear, that is reassemble all the oddly shaped, interlocking pieces, back into a complete picture, just like before the original picture is being cut into pieces.
Try playing around with the puzzle by clicking this link.

History of Jigsaw Puzzle
Jigsaw puzzle originated from a European cartographer called John Spilsbury. In the 1760s, he cut a wooden map of British Empire into pieces, to aid the aristocracy's children on learning the geography of the lands Britain ruled. These early wooden puzzles were called Dissected Maps, and the history of Jigsaw Puzzle began that time. The popularity of the puzzle increased steadily among the upper class in both Europe and US, throughout the 1800s.
By the 1900s, in US wooden jigsaw puzzle has evolved from children educational toy into a form of entertainment for wealthy adults. It was only until the 1930s, during the Great Depression, die-cut and cardboard jigsaw puzzles were mass produced. This is because those puzzles were much cheaper compared to the wooden one, so that the puzzles can meet the market demand of the families struggling through the Great Depression.

Until today, wooden jigsaw puzzle is still a high-end, niche market, due to its high production cost. Therefore cardboard jigsaw puzzles are still mass produced today.

Fifteen Puzzle

In this post, I'll introduce to my readers, another popular puzzle called Fifteen Puzzle.

Actually, you might not see this puzzle quite common now, but I'm sure you have see many of its variants before, and probably even played one before when you were a small kid, something like this:
These puzzles, are considered as the variations of the original Fifteen Puzzle.
The aim of the puzzle, is to rearrange the pieces, 1 at a time, from the scrambled state to the original state like what you saw in the top picture. There is only 1 movable piece at a time, as the empty space on the puzzle can only fits 1 moving piece.

You can try out the puzzle by clicking this link.
Watch the video below for tutorials on how to solve this puzzle:


According to 'The 15 Puzzle', a book published by Jerry Slocum and Dic Sonneveld in 2006, the fifteen puzzle was invented by Noyes Chapman, the Postmaster of Canastota in New York.

Battleship

In this post, I will talk about another logic based puzzle, Battleship (sometimes also called Bimaru, Solitaire Battleships)

The aim of the puzzle is to locate ships of different lengths on the puzzle grid. The size of the puzzle grid usually ranges from 6x6 to 10x10. Where for the ships, they usually lengths from 1 to 5 grids.
Numbers are given for each row and column, indicating the number of ship segments located on that particular row or column. Besides, the number of ship for each sizes located in the puzzle grid are also provided to the solver.
There is also another rule in the puzzle, where parts of different ships are not allow to be in contact with each other horizontally, vertically, or even diagonally. In other words, the adjacent grids of a ship should only be water(grid that is not occupied by a ship segment)

The puzzle was invented in Argentina, by Jaime Poniachik in 1982, when the first puzzles appeared in the November 1982 issue of a Spanish puzzle magazine called Humor & Juegos.

Minesweeper

Minesweeper puzzle is also one of the most popular puzzles in the world.
It is most commonly seen on computers, because the minesweeper puzzles are often bundled with computer operating systems, for example, Microsoft Windows.













The main aim of the puzzle is to identify and eliminate all the 'mines' hidden in the grids. Some numbers are included in the puzzle, the number tells how many of its adjacent squares contain mines.
Try playing the puzzle by clicking this link.

Since the position of the mines are fixed, only one unique solution will be able to solve the puzzle. There are two variations of the puzzle. In the first variation, number of mines in the puzzle will not be given, the solver can only rely on the numbers given in the puzzle to eliminate the mines. For the second variation, the number of mines is given, and the solver will be able to track the number of mines remaining in the puzzle as the solving progresses.

The original version of minesweeper puzzle found in Microsoft Windows was written by Robert Donner and Curt Johnson. The puzzle has not changed much over the years, until it was rewrote by Oberon under the hire of Microsoft during the development of Windows Vista.

Word Search Puzzle

In this post, I will talk about another popular puzzle called word search (can also called word find, word seek or mystery word) puzzle.

The puzzle is built using a group of letters aligned into grids, and the solver is required to find the hidden strings of letter that resemble the words given from the hints. The string of letters can be vertically, horizontally, and also diagonally.
However, sometimes the hints are not provided to the solver, this increases the difficulty level of the puzzle, and also testing the vocabulary skill of the solver.

This puzzle is commonly used by teachers for teaching new words to the students.
The puzzle was created, and published originally by Norman E. Gibat in the Selenby Digest, on March 1, 1968.

Feel free to try out this puzzle by clicking this link.

Crossword Puzzle

After Sudoku, I believe another most common puzzle which people can see in newspapers is the crossword puzzle.

It is a puzzle formed by white and shaded squares. To solve the puzzle, letters have to be filled in the white squares, to form words or phrases. Clues are given together with the puzzle. and will lead the solver to the answers.

Feel free to watch the video below, for tips on how to solve a crossword puzzle:


History of Crossword Puzzle
The puzzle was invented by a journalist called Arthur Wynne. He published the first ever crossword puzzle in the New York World on December 21, 1913. Originally, the puzzle was known as word-cross puzzle, and eventually gained its current name after 'evolution' through time.
The puzzle gained a major breakthrough in its development when personal computer was introduced to the world. Software was developed, so that users can create their own crossword puzzle. For example, Crossword Weaver was developed by a company called Variety Games Inc. in 1997.

Sudoku

In this blog, I'll introduce some of the most popular puzzles to my readers....

In my first post, I shall talk about one of the most common puzzle we can find today: Sudoku

"Su" means number in Japanese, and "doku" means single or unmarried.

Basically, the concept of solving the puzzle is to fill up numbers from 0 to 9 in each empty boxes, but the numbers can only occur once in each smaller 3x3 square grid, and also in every row and column.

Although the puzzle consists of only numbers, but arithmetic skills is not needed for solving this puzzle, because Sudoku is actually a logic-based type of puzzle.

Watch the video below for guides and tips on how to solve a Sudoku puzzle:


History of Sudoku
In the 18th century, a Swiss mathematician called Leonhard Euler developed the concept of 'Latin Squares', the concept where numbers in a grid appear only once, across, up and down.

The current, modern form of Sudoku that we are familiar with, started to get into shape in the late 1970's, when the Dell Magazines in US published a puzzle called Number Place, a puzzle that was created based on the 'Euler's Concept' with a 9x9 square grid. The puzzle was developed by a puzzle maker called Howard Garnes.

The puzzle was first introduced in Japan on 1984, by Nikoli, a leading puzzle creating company in Japan.
The puzzle was first named as Suuji Wa Dokushin Ni Kagiru (which means "the number must be single" or "the number must occur only once"). It was only until 1986, the name Sudoku was abbreviated from its original long name after Kaji Maki, the president of Nikoli found out the long name was the only problem of the puzzle.

Today, Sudoku can be found in major newspapers around the globe, on the Internet, where websites like Sudoku: Daily Puzzles, Web Sudoku and Sudoku Puzzles can be found. Sudoku puzzles are also available in the form of phone applications, where the puzzle can be generated by the application itself.
You can even seek help from Sudoku Solver if you have trouble solving the puzzle.