Zucca's Puzzle

Zucca's Puzzle

The Unnamed Piece
It's the natural son of a Sexehex and a Drafter

Unnamed

"Mf-m-F"

The two-side Unnamed Pieces are 1355. Here is the complete ascii list. Don't think that the list is not complete. Remember: "f" becomes "F" and "m" becomes "M" if you flip the piece. The barycenter is not a true barycenter, but a point of rotation. The pieces can be placed on a sexehexes grid.

The 1355 Pieces Zucca's Puzzle

1355 Zucca's Puzzle

Who will accept the challenge?

Click here or the picture below to see the best today known solution (scale 100% - 50KB). You can do better.

CONTEST

I offer a free SexeHexeS set

to the first solver of Zucca's Puzzle, also with irregular edge. The solver must to send an ascii text for solution testing, in the form " x, y, piece", 1355 rows. Example:

30, 31, mmFMMF
31, 32, F-M-mm
32, 31, Mf---M
31, 30, F-FFf-
30, 29, -MMM-F
29, 30, m--fFf
...

The drawing is optional (please:*.GIF, black & white). All solver methods are admitted. Time limit: 31 Dec 2001. The pieces must be oriented. See also the definitions in More about SexeHexeS. The contest is friendly. I'm the unobiectonable judge.

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STOP !!!
We have the winner.
(see below)

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Sep 11th 2000

I knocked down on this World by chance. If nobody solves this puzzle I come back on my Planet!

I want to say here that the puzzle is more easy than you could think. Because the pieces are "baricentered" and because there are probably more solutions than atoms in the Universe (sic!)

This is not a game of patience, but of intelligence. I know only a man on this Earth who would be able to build 1355 wood pieces and solve the puzzle manually. I should not like his solution arrives first! However who would cover this way, here there is the 1355 pieces complete drawing [142KB].

I asked to Internet People to build a simple Solver Machine as below, ascii input, ascii output:

Solver Machine

You have the complete ascii list on a silver plate already. Certainly you don't must to do simple permutations of 1355 pieces. Your computer is too primitive for this job. You must to invent an other way.

Then you could verify your work by the Drawing Machine that I have built for you:

Drawing Machine

You can to download it here: ZuccaPuzzle.zip - Setup for Win95/... [1.417KB].

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Jun 1.st 2000

The winner is: Mark Stubbings

With compliments! He found the 1355 pieces solution with the ragged edge. These are his words: "I use a brute force program, with periodic, random backtracking to get variation... I used a program I wrote to try to solve the eternity puzzle. There were a few modifications. The program placed the pieces from the centre outwards in a spiral. When it got stuck, it tried changing the previous piece, making sure the common side was different. If it still could not get further, it removed a whole layer, and tried again. I had two other enhancements in the pipeline but a solution was found overnight before they were implemented. The program finds a solution in less than a minute, now, usually (on a 300Mhz PC).

Solution by Mark Stubbings