Puzzles

I have always loved puzzles. All kinds, too, from crossword puzzles to sudoku puzzles to jigsaw puzzles to those little sliding puzzles with the 15 little tiles and the one blank space and you have to shift them one at a time until all the numbers are in the right order.

I even like to work on puzzles I’m not very good at just on the off chance that I might crack the code, like the peg puzzle at Cracker Barrel. You know the one, with the little golf tee looking pegs on the wooden triangle, where you jump them all, checkers style, trying to eliminate them all until there’s just one left. I can usually get to around three and occasionally two (which I believe qualifies me as an “egg-no-ray-moose”). I have actually solved it before, but I don’t know how I did it… or maybe I actually cheated without knowing somehow.

I have never, ever actually solved a Rubik’s Cube, thought. There’s one sitting on my desk right now, in fact with the yellow side perfectly done — and the other five sides in a mish-mash of mismatched colors. And yes, I know that’s not even how you solve a Rubik’s Cube. You can’t just do one side and then another side and so on and so forth until all six sides are done.

There’s a mathematical formula and pattern that once you learn it, they say you’re never more than 24 moves away from solving it. While that might be true, I did find another way to sove a Rubik’s Cube.

If you take a flat-head screwdriver and insert in between one of the middle square and the square above it, the little

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wedge will pop right out and (assuming you didn’t break it) you can then slide all of the other pieces, one by one, off of this little gyro-ball in the middle until you’ve got 26 little cubes with little notches on their backs that you can then put back on the cube in any order you choose (the “completed cube” is the classic choice, but I actually prefer to make a cool “checkerboard” pattern, but to each his own…

Is it cheating? Maybe, but who are you cheating? I think it’s actually a case of critical thinking and creative problem solving myself.

I’ve done puzzles my whole life. It’s probably why my uncle, some 40 years ago, decided to give me a puzzle to solve. It was a simple rectangle drawn on a piece of paper. Inside the rectangle there were five smaller rectangles, two on the top and three on the bottom, kind of like a brickwork pattern. The goal, he told me, was to draw a single line through each of the lines in the drawing, only once per line.

Simple enough, right?

Well, apparently not, as I spent many, many years doodling that rectangle puzzle any time I had a few minutes to kill — first in school, then at college, then at work (seriously, this went on for years). I never could figure it out.

This went on for an embarrassingly long time before one day I decided to see if I could find the answer on the internet (which didn’t even exist when I first started trying to solve this puzzle.

Even finding the puzzle online was a puzzle in and of itself. I mean, what exaclty did I type into Google? I tried now and again over the next several years and one day either Google got advanced enough to figure out what I was looking for or I somehow had never Googled “five rectangle puzzle” but the first hit that particular time was a Wikipedia entry for the “Five Room Puzzle.”

My heart skipped a beat as I saw on the screen the familiar diagram I had scratched out on paper at least 10,000 times since I was 8 years old. I was pretty jazzed that I was going to finally find out what the solution to this brain teaser was. I ckicked on the link, which took me to Wikipedia. I read the first sentence, which read, “The Five Room Puzzle is a popular classic unsolvable or impossible puzzle…”

I flinched. I felt like young Ralphie in “A Christmas Story” when he finally receives his Little Orphan Annie Secret Decoder Ring only to find out that the important message from Annie is “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.”

In life, we all encounter little puzzles along the way.

Some of them, if we apply logic and are persistent, we can solve. Others, like the Five Room Puzzle, simply do not have any real solutions.

For those, might I recommend taking a flat-head screwdriver and, well…