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Bulbous Blob Puzzle

The Bulbous Blob Puzzle is a great variation on standard sliding block puzzles.  The puzzle was designed by Oskar van Deventer and James Stephens.  In a traditional sliding block puzzle you move square blocks around the board in order to get them into a particular configuration or to get a specified block off of the board.  The the Bulbous Blob Puzzle, you’re no longer dealing with squares, you’re dealing with, well… bulbous blobs.  It’s a nice twist and very challenging.  There’s a flash implementation at the site linked above.

Bulbous Blob Puzzle

Found through Natural Blogarithms.

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Posted by Josh in Types/Variations (Thursday February 15, 2007 at 7:58 pm)
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The Hardest Sliding Block Puzzle

It’s called Quzzle and it was invented by Jim Lewis with the aid of a computer.  There’s a nice write up about the puzzle on the blog for the Ebiquity Research Group at University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Most people know of sliding block puzzles through Rush Hour or similar games.  Lewis wanted to come up with the most difficult puzzle he could, which meant that the puzzle needed to have a long solution and that it needed to have lots of dead ends.  You try the puzzle for yourself with this Java applet.  You can also buy it here.

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Posted by Josh in Puzzle (Tuesday September 26, 2006 at 11:01 am)
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