With a laser-cutter, it is easy to make one-of-a-kind jigsaw puzzles. The question then is what pattern of cuts to use. Here is a gallery of some experiments I have been making in which the cut pattern is based on a warped grid. A pseudorandom…
In this puzzle you must find the most crooked path on a board made of squares. Each square is visited at most once, but you need not visit all squares. Your path goes from square to adjacent square, and should have as many 90-degree turns as…
An animal based who-is-who in which with the right three questions any animal becomes uniquely identified using a ternary "sieve". For the first 16 animals this also works in binary.
Like Origami meets Lego. No scissors, tape, or glue. This modular paper cutout is based on triangular geometry and mates with neighbors (edge-connecting) to create tetrahedra, octohedra, and icosahedra. The resulting polyhedra can then mate once…
An ant wants to travel from one corner of the Sierpinski carpet to the opposite corner using the shortest possible route. And his friend, a termite, wants to do the same in the Menger sponge. Can you guide them well?
The Martian Mayor Problem looks at designing square modular networks which create Euclidean distances between modules. The catch is that there are a limited number of tunnels (connections) between modules. This is a mostly open problem as far as I…
Destroying flexagons can be fun and artistic! We suggest 4 different ways to artistically destroy flexagons, each with its own merit. Our exchange gift is a set of 4 flexagons strips, one for each demonstration and the attached explanation sheet.
Martin Gardner would sometimes wrap puzzles inside stories he concocted, such as with the book “The Numerology of Dr. Matrix.” The following puts my favorite puzzle in that tradition: The Accountant
by Barney Sperlin