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Recently I designed a calendar puzzle with 10 tetris-like pieces. When you place all the puzzle pieces on the board, three squares/rhombuses are still open and together they form a date. Can you arrange the puzzle pieces in such a way that it shows todays date? See https://praxispuzzles.com/calendar_puzzle_rhombus Disclaimer: I sell these puzzles for a little more than the raw material.

Tangential, but does anyone know good places to find other physical puzzles like this? Also, recently there was an article on elastic knots I was hoping someone would productize into a novelty puzzle.

Oh my god, take my money, please. These types of tactile puzzles are the ideal nerdsnipe for me.

It would be nice, if they could publish the exact cover. I have written some algorithm that can estimate the number of solutions to an exact cover base on the number of solutions it found and the size of the 'tree' that has been explored.

I could write a program myself to calculate the exact cover, but I guess, it will take me about a day to do so. It would not surprise me if the exact cover will be a few hundred mega bytes (when using one character per position).

Reminds me of the 1 million pound first solution prize Eternity puzzle ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternity_puzzle

Very interesting, but I have a hard time differentiating the colors. The gradients seem to be there for aesthetics only, but they confuse me to no end :)

Looks amazing but getting 500 errors from the payment flow and the FLUMMOX discount code doesn't work as advertised.

Love Nervous System design. I have quite a few pieces from them including one of their infinity puzzles. Very high quality work.

I have a smaller version of this puzzle. It's fun and easy to get lost in. My wife was convinced we were missing a piece until I solved it.

Nice article, which also explains the mapping of the puzzle to an exact cover problem and how those can be solved with dangling links as in Knuth's Algorithm X.

Absolutely love this. Amazing creativity!

Totally feeling like vibe-coding a web version of the game and plastering it with giant BUY THIS THING links that send people to the real thing.

So many puzzles like this basically require you to brute-force the solution [0], which just isn’t all that fun. I’m glad the designers explicitly acknowledge they’re trying to avoid this, and really hope that their claim that this actually can be solved with logic holds true:

   What if instead of doing the full colored puzzle, we find partial sets of tiles where there is only one unique solution? This adds enough constraints to the problem that it becomes feasible [without resorting to brute force].

[0] https://www.puzzlemaster.ca/search/?c=woodpacking%2Cwoodtang...