Dirty 36Cube

Tags: personal, Date: 2012-08-19

This is a short rant on what I consider to be a good puzzle and why the trick 36Cube pulls is rather dirty.

WARNING, spoilers ahead.

Got this crafty beast for Christmas, and since then I lost many evenings to juggling permutations of towers over the inverted city skyline. The game can be solved two ways:

  1. by being cleverer than Euler,

  2. by being streetwise.

We are going to concentrate on option 2 for the obvious reason. It can be argued that to solve this puzzle one must be an outside-the-box thinker, examine every opportunity, leave no stone unturned. No tower, rather.

The fact that I wouldn't even have solved it without the help of my wife (who has a few more feet on the ground than I do) must make me an in-the-box thinker. A naive one, too, who believes that the differences on the insides of towers must be manufacturing artifacts. Damn you, thnkbx, you have just crossed the line of having no decency at all.

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