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Curing Instant Insanity II. (English) Zbl 1398.05045

Summary: Instant Insanity II is a 4 by 4 sliding tile puzzle designed by Philip Orbanes. The packaging indicates that there is a unique solution to the puzzle, up to rotations of the columns and permutations on the rows. However, a recent paper by Richmond and Young shows that there are in fact two solutions to the puzzle. This paper presents several attempts at “fixing” the puzzle to guarantee a unique solution. Of these, the only one that guaranteed a unique solution was removing a color to create a 3 by 3 puzzle.

MSC:

05B15 Orthogonal arrays, Latin squares, Room squares
00A08 Recreational mathematics
91A46 Combinatorial games
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References:

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