Puzzling DNA - GeneTIC

We are still working on discovering the secrets of the DNA puzzle, but where in there is the puzzle gene?  Would looking for the puzzle gene in the DNA puzzle be a meta puzzle?

Great-Grandpa's Puzzle

As for myself, although my parents are very intelligent, puzzles just aren’t their thing.  So where does that puzzle gene come from?  It turns out that one of my great-grandfathers was a doctor who enjoyed working on puzzles.  I’m hoping that I don’t have to wait for my great-grandchildren to carry the torch.

Speaking of the torch, my wife can’t understand why anyone would display firewood in the china cabinet and occasionally reminds me of the bonfire that will be held when I go.  I frequently have to remind her that she shouldn’t burn through the family fortune all at once. (Upon reading this, my wife pointed out that she was more than willing to have firewood in the china cabinet and was actually the one who made room for it.) 

These thoughts were sparked by Andrew Crowell’s new puzzle, GeneTIC. The puzzle has a difficulty rating of 7.5.5.2.5 (This is my best guess from counting the moves by hand, but I’m sure that Andrew has an official count generated from his program that will be released in a future puzzle update.  Counting rotational moves is not always straightforward).  This is the latest addition to the puzzles Andrew has labeled “Hardest”.  However, in my opinion, this puzzle should be labelled excellent instead of hardest based on the feeling that I had after completing it.  Not difficult, but very enjoyable.

Each of Andrews TICs is a treat and I think of them as puzzle candy.  Each one provides an enjoyable experience from first inspection to determine where the pieces need to reside up through determining the gyrations that each piece requires to get there.  I recommend GeneTIC as an exemplar of this process.

As with many of Andrew’s Turning Interlocking Cube (TIC) designs, there is a big cage/frame piece that holds several smaller pieces together in a cube.  GeneTIC has 5 of these smaller pieces, with the smallest being what I am coming to consider the classic “Crowell TIC piece”.  These innocuous looking little pieces move, rotate, and provide a lot of fun without falling out of the puzzle.

Being a TIC (not you, the puzzle), you know that there is a rotational move required somewhere.  For GeneTIC, 4 of the pieces require rotations and the single piece that is not rotated is the odd one out.  In other words, TIC on steroids, and in a 4x4x4 cubic dissection format!  As a puzzle designer myself, struggling to conceive TIC designs, I can only marvel at the prodigious output of the Crowell TIC production engine in both quality and quantity.

You’ve undoubtedly noticed from the photos that my version of GeneTIC was 3D printed.  As far as I know, all of Andrew’s puzzles have a unique color scheme and GeneTIC can be identified as the puzzle with the white frame and green pieces.  Recently hampered by budgetary constraints, I was forced to make some difficult puzzle acquisition decisions.  I’ve noticed several puzzlers have adopted a buy, solve, sell approach, but I’ve never been able to give up a puzzle and this strategy wouldn’t work too well for me.  My two options were to buy all 14 of Andrew’s hardest TIC’s as 3D printed puzzles or try to select 3 or 4 of them from the list.  This time I decided to collect them all in the 3D printed format.  Of course, the 3d printed versions are nowhere near as nice as the finely crafted works of art made with exotic woods, but my desire to have all the hardest designs ended up being the major consideration.  I’ve seen several comments on the Internet from people lamenting that puzzles have become too expensive to fit in their budget.  3D printing is part of the solution to that dilemma.

So, my recent order from Andrew consisted of all 14 of the hardest and 2 of the medium, 3D printed puzzles.  When they were ready, Andrew emailed me a photo of the 16 puzzles assembled.  However, they arrived as a jumble of puzzle pieces.  Nice guy, that Andrew Crowell!  In all fairness, I requested to receive them unassembled so that I could fully enjoy the discovery process.

Pre-Shipped vs. Received

With 16 of these puzzles at the beginning of this year, I decided to do an Andrew Crowell TIC series with a dedicated entry each month.  GeneTIC is the January post and the first for 2020.  My biggest challenge will be to space them out over the year and keep from doing them all at once now.