Welcome to the fifth spotlight of the Lilly Library’s Mechanical Puzzle blog series, written by Andrew Rhoda, the Lilly Library’s Curator of Puzzles!
What are Sequential Movement Puzzles?
Sequential movement puzzles have solutions that focus on patterns of moves to reach the solution. As Jerry Slocum and his co-authors write in Puzzles Old and New, “Sequential movement puzzles require a series of steps or moves, following a set of rules, to reach a predetermined goal” (Slocum et al. 1986, 117). At times, these puzzles can also have solutions with multiple phases with different sets of moves, as with three-dimensional rotating puzzles, often called “twisty puzzles”.
Examples of Sequential Movement Puzzles
Having covered puzzles that include sequential movement along with other methods of solving previously, I will focus on puzzles that are solely sequential movement puzzles in this post. Solitaire puzzles, also known as peg solitaire puzzles, are examples of such a puzzle. The origin of the puzzle is unknown, with John Beasley in his Ins and Outs of Peg Solitaire citing a French engraving from 1697 as the first evidence of the puzzle, with a document written by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for the Berlin Academy in 1710 as the first written description of solitaire (Beasley 1985, 3). In his recent publication, The Delight of Peg Solitaire, Beasly revisits a discussion of the history of the puzzle. There he writes, “The ultimate origins of the game are however obscure. It was certainly played at the court of Louis XIV on a 37-hole board which we shall meet in Chapter 8 (there are references in French sources to 1697), but according to Leibniz the game had previously been played in Germany with the requirement of vacating and filling the center, which is not possible on the 37-hole board. More now cannot be said” (Beasley 2021, 12). Both of Beasley’s publications go on to discuss the variations that solitaire takes along with the theory behind those distinct puzzle arrangements. However, the rules for these puzzles remain the same, which is to take one of the pieces and jump over another piece to an empty space. You then remove the piece that was jumped over and continue until there is one piece left.
This category also features two of the most well-known mechanical puzzles. The first being the “15 Puzzle,” as it is known today. The designer of this puzzle was unknown for most of the puzzle’s existence. However, Jerry Slocum and Dic Sonneveld researched the history of the puzzle for their book, The 15 Puzzle: How It Drove the World Crazy, and found that a postmaster from upstate New York, Noyes Palmer Chapman, was the inventor of the puzzle (Slocum and Sonneveld 2006, 109). In their book, they trace the path that the puzzle took from its creation by Chapman to its eventual first commercial production by Matthias Rice in Boston as The Gem Puzzle (Slocum and Sonneveld, 2006, 109). In that book, Slocum and Sonneveld also trace the popularity of the puzzle around the world through historical documents and include the history of the mathematical literature around the Fifteen Puzzle (Slocum and Sonneveld 2006, 11-69; Slocum and Sonneveld 2006, 110-120).
The other famous puzzle in this category is the Rubik’s Cube, named after its designer, Hungarian architect and designer, Ernő Rubik. For most people, it is the most immediately recognizable mechanical puzzle. Of its origins, David Singmaster writes in his chapter of The Cube: The Ultimate Guide to the World’s Bestselling Puzzle, that, “In the spring of 1974, while he was teaching three-dimensional design, he [Rubik] had his epiphany. One of the standard exercises was to have students make cardboard cubes to show how cutting a cube in half each way produces eight cubes of half the size. The sides of the cube were colored to the relations between the large cube, and the smaller cubes were clear. Rubik realized that turning one row of the cubes would rearrange the smaller cubes but re-form a large cube – and the concept for the puzzle was born” (Slocum et al 2009, 22). More recently, Rubik himself described the origins of his famous puzzle, “One day – I don’t know exactly when, I don’t know exactly why – an idea took hold of me: I thought it would be interesting to put together eight small cubes in such a manner that they remained joined together but were also capable of being moved individually” (Rubik 2020, 48). From that idea Rubik worked on the question, following the path described by Singmaster, eventually creating his famous Cube, which appeared commercially first as Bűvős Kocka in Rubik’s native Hungary in 1977 (Rubik 2020, 91).
A favorite of many mechanical puzzlers from its first appearance, creating a subset of “twisty” puzzle collectors who focus on similar puzzles, with Slocum and Botermans praising it as “one of the most ingenious and diabolical puzzles of all time” (Slocum and Botermans 1994, 124). Puzzle designers took inspiration from the Rubik’s Cube and have expanded on the Rubik’s Cube’s form to challenge these puzzle enthusiasts. As Rubik writes in Cubed, “When the Cube craze began, puzzles were hardly considered worthy of being toys at all by the mainstream. But the Cube’s success spawned a whole new marketplace of twisty puzzles, a huge extended family with many relatives having the DNA of the Cube’s principles of construction” (Rubik 2020, 141). In his chapter in The Cube: The Ultimate Guide to the World’s Bestselling Puzzle, Geert Hellings describes some of the members of that extended family including the commercially available variations of the Rubik’s Cube along with specific designers that hand crafted their twisty puzzles inspired by the Rubik’s Cube (Slocum et al. 2009, 41-65).
If you are interested in seeing more put-together puzzles in the Slocum Puzzle Collection you can learn more at https://libraries.indiana.edu/lilly-library/mechanical-puzzles, or by attending the Friday Puzzle Tour held from 1:00pm to 2:00pm in the Slocum Room.
About the author: Andrew Rhoda is the Curator of Puzzles at the Lilly Library, where he oversees the 35,000 mechanical puzzles in the Jerry Slocum Mechanical Puzzle Collection, in addition to the Slocum book and manuscript collections. He hosts classes from across disciplines who visit the collection, and he has presented on mechanical puzzles and the collection at puzzle events here in Bloomington and around the world.
Bibliography
Beasley, John. 2021. The Delights of Peg Solitaire. Published by the author. https://www.jsbeasley.co.uk/delights/delights.pdf.
Beasley, John D. 1985. The Ins and Outs of Peg Solitaire. Oxford University Press.
Rubik, Erno. 2020. Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All. Flatiron Books.
Slocum, Jerry, David Singmaster, Dieter Gebhardt, Wei-Hwa Huang, and Geert Hellings. 2009. The Cube: The Ultimate Guide to the World’s Bestselling Puzzle. Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers.
Slocum, Jerry and Dic Sonneveld. 2006. The 15 Puzzle: How It Drove the World Crazy. Slocum Puzzle Foundation.
Slocum, Jerry. and Jack Botermans. 1994. The Book of Ingenious & Diabolical Puzzles. Times Books.
Slocum, Jerry and Jack Botermans, Carla von Splunteren, and Tony Burrett. 1986. Puzzles Old and New: How to Make and Solve Them. Plenary Publications International (Europe).
Leave a Reply