<2D puzzle anecdote>
My elderDotter has an affection for puzzles and they gave out tiled
calendar "puzzles" (3D printed) for Xmas this year with no
explanation or instructions. It was fun to "puzzle out" the first
date arrangement and a few more, then it was interesting to "puzzle
out" the meta-rules for how to arrive at the daily "solution" most
efficiently, then it was interesting to puzzle out whether each date
had a *unique* solution, and now puzzling out whether all days have
multiple solutions and/or the number of alternate solutions is
uniform across dates... meta-meta?
My yungerDotter is yet more adept and fascinated with such puzzles
but is not prone to any analytic reflection on them... she just
loves jamming them out... though her forte is in word-puzzles. I
can enjoy such puzzles to a point (spatial, arithmetic and language)
but quickly get shifted into the "meta" and then (perhaps it
applies) the meta-meta.
Mary sits down and solves the calendar date most every day and
reports whether it falls in place quickly or is an excruciating
ordeal... such seems to reflect her mental/emotional state much more
than the idiosyncracies of any given date.
< vending/pinball/rod-logic anecdote>
I don't know if it qualifies as "puzzles" exactly but it does seem
to rhyme: As a child, one of my classmates' father owned a vending
machine company (in a very remote area, so half-dozen pinball, soda,
cigarette, candy machines he serviced over a 50 mile radius).
There were always a handful of machines in their carport/workshop
area in various states of repair and my friend seemed to understand
the basic *logics* of each machine. This was all pre digital and
the soda machines were the only solenoid actuated... the others were
all "rod and gear logic". The pinballs were full of solenoids of
course, but seeing how they were electrically and mechanically
sequenced in series and parallel was fascinating. I *saw* them as
puzzles, essentially challenging me to reverse engineer the causal
dynamics. I dreamed in rod-logics (candy/cigarette machines) for
the longest time... just *how* does a combination of
nickel-dime-quarter "slugs" actuate the logic to release a candy-bar
of one of several prices and how to *program* such so that one
wasn't confined to each candy-slot being permanently aligned with a
specific price. I think the cigarettes were all a single price so
the logic was more about prices rising over time.
<semi-automated radio station anecdote>
Later, I worked at a small radio-station which ran semi-automated
much of the time with 4 large carousels of music, advertisement and
PSAs which were "programmed" by placing (conductive) pins in
matrices essentially defining precedent for which carousel (filled
with continuous loop 4-track tapes of single songs/commercials/PSAs)
would fire after the last ended. More solenoids and yet more...
the hourly "fade into network-news" logic was dependent only on
the last selected carousel being music not commercial or PSA... I
was not authorized to modify the logic system but I did befriend the
engineers who were and managed to get a few novel "systems" into
place to help prevent things like running a "don't pollute PSA"
right before/after a "Oil Company" advert.
I ran my own night-time rock show 4 nights a week which was
nominally "live" but I was in the habit of loading the carousels at
the start of the night and doing manual intros/outros and sometimes
doing JIT changes to the implied "playlist" as the evening
unfolded. I also had a protocol for doing the transfer from
freshly received records onto 4-track cartidges as I was playing
them live-from-vinyl the first time. I myself became sort of a
program executive loop at three levels (1) keeping the sequencing
through the evening coherent; 2) setting an evening up so it was
easy to do so or hard to do otherwise; 3) building stacks of
cartridges for future nights alongside stacks of vinyl to be played
first-time/recorded... My rhythm was metronomed by the "standard"
length of pop/rock songs with longer scale eigenfunctions applied to
dimensions like musical style, vintage, etc.
<Rubik's Cube and Math Anecdote>
I didn't realize I was "solving puzzles" then, but it was not long
before the Rubik's Cube craze brought puzzle solving into pop
culture in a new way. I was just being introduced to Group Theory
in my math classes at that moment and it was a a good hands-on
intuitive place to develop intuition of such.
My father had introduced me to paper-puzzles like Konigsberg or
Hanoi and wooden (also hanoi) "Burr" puzzles, though he was acutely
naive about how the "worked".
<@home distributed/marshalling and puzzle solving anecdote>
In 06 I was on sabbatical at LBL and tried to "help" with the
proto-protein folding work they were doing which was *trying* to
become a facilitator for the rosetta/foldit at-home exercises in the
way UCB had facilitated SETI-at-home?
In the spirit of our "effing the ineffable" discussions here, I feel
that the @home efforts were *more* than merely marshalling large
distributed networks of compute resources, but in fact engaging in a
specific structured type of thermal noise for energy minimization?
On 4/6/26 11:43 am, Dave Rossetti wrote:
Hi Glen,
Well, there are versions of mechanical puzzles that are mutable and
somewhat programmable, the first one that comes to mind is The
Hexadecimal Puzzle
https://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~storer/JimPuzzles/ZPAGES/zzzHexadecimalPuzzle.html where
one can “program” the gate to allow 16 different puzzles; it’s an
antique and I have a couple in my collection.
Another is the amazing Pipe Organ Desk by my friend Kagen Sound
https://kagensound.com/pipeorgandesk.html where you can “program” the
desk to open with a specified song. Yeah, there’s just one desk and
it’s owned by filmmaker Darren Aronofsky.
Here is a very deep and wide website where you can peruse all
submissions and winners of the annual IPP Design Competition for the
past 25 years, an amazing view of the progressing state of the art of
mechanical puzzles https://puzzleworld.org/DesignCompetition/. Notice
that 3D printing has swept through the field in recent times. [Right
now I’m sticking with fine woodworking :-]
And finally, as for puzzles with more than one solution, there are
many. Obviously people love the elegance of a single-solution puzzle
but sometimes the geometry, symmetries, and math behind a puzzle are
demonstrated by multiple solutions.
Oh, and there are many branches to the mechanical puzzle world. Puzzle
hunts relate, so to escape rooms, and I just received what I’d call an
“escape room in a box” where you have in front of you a series of
discoveries to make as you solve . . . it took me and a friend a
couple of hours of hard thinking and brainstorming. Would be happy to
host a gathering to solve it.
Not a perfect answer to your “meta” question but plenty to be inspired by!
- Dave
On Apr 6, 2026, at 10:00 AM, [email protected] wrote:
*From:*glen <[email protected]>
*Subject:**Re: [FRIAM] Dave Rossetti, new to the group*
*Date:*April 6, 2026 at 8:30:32 AM MDT
*To:*[email protected]
This is very cool. Given that you make them with your own hands, I'll
risk asking this, here, instead of querying the internet first: Are
there puzzles analogous to meta-games, including things [like
this](https://jdh.hamkins.org/the-rule-making-game/), but also
emergent play like you see in massive multi-player open world games,
etc.?
I can imagine there are some mechanical puzzles that have more than 1
solution. This would be a step along the road to a meta-game of some
kind. Obviously, there are Legos and erector sets and such. But I'm
wondering if there are things in between, just barely meta over the 1
solution puzzle box. They must exist. And I'm betting you could point
me to it faster than I could find it by clicking around.
On 4/4/26 10:31 AM, Dave Rossetti wrote:
Hi All,
I’m new to the list via Tom Johnson who invited me to Friam coffee
yesterday — thank you Tom — and I’ll introduce myself.
I retired from a full and happy career in Silicon Valley, finishing
up with many years at Cisco Systems developing software, hardware,
and leading advanced technology and the Cisco Research Center. My
LinkedIn profile is https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-rossetti-aa45222.
I am a collector and maker of mechanical
puzzleshttps://puzzleworld.org/PuzzleWorld/, collecting continuously
since my grad school days in the 1970s and a core participant of the
international puzzle community. So far my puzzles are always finely
handcrafted in fine woods, analog style, and I’d be happy to share
this with any of you who might be interested. Here’s a nice NYT
article covering a recent International Puzzle Party in Houston, see:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/16/science/puzzle-party-slocum.html?unlocked_article_code=1.XFA.jdDK.fdcOgECR44kc&smid=url-share
<https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/16/science/puzzle-party-slocum.html?unlocked_article_code=1.XFA.jdDK.fdcOgECR44kc&smid=url-share>
Right now I’m preparing to head off to Italy in a couple of months
for this year’s annual IPP. I brought three of my puzzles to Friam
yesterday including a copy of my puzzle for this year’s IPP
Exchange, of which I have made 110 copies to exchange with the other
participants, see below. Walnut tray with Wenge pieces.
--
¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους,
ἵνα σώσω.
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--- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
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