Hi Twisty Puzzles fans,

UNSCRAMBLED is a puzzle that has been discussed before on the Twisty Puzzles Forum here, here, here and here. This puzzle is the result of a collaboration between Bram Cohen, George Miller and myself. Bram came up with the idea of a hockey-puck type of puzzle with dovetails, after seeing my Turn Apart puzzle at the Boston International Puzzle Party in 2006.

George Miller has made many prototypes from my 3D designs. Ultimately, we found a well working design, which George published on his Puzzle Palace webpage. That version is actually a take-apart puzzle. George called the puzzle UNSCRAMBLED, which is an 11-letter word with all different letters. When solved, the puzzle reads "UNSCRAMBLED", which is an appropriate description of the solved state.

The puzzle has 11 segments, and acts like a bandaged 22-segment hockey puck. It was designed such that you can go from most states to two or more other states. This means that its state diagram has hardly any dead ends, but it isn't too meshed either, which guarantees a long solve path. Still the diameter of the state space is only around 23 moves. Jaap Scherphuis has made a thorough analysis of the puzzle, but I am not sure whether he has ever published it. I wrote a JAVA applet to solve the puzzle from any state. The algorithm is breadth-frist-search-meet-in-the-middle, if you are interested. I don't think a human can ever solve a randomly scrambled UNSCRAMBLED puzzle without the help of a computer.

Bram suggested to make a new version of UNSCRAMBLED in a more traditional hockey-puck style. So here it is.

Watch the YouTube video.
Buy the puzzle at my Shapeways Shop.
Read more at the Shapeways Forum.
Read more at Puzzle Palace.
Check out the photos below.

Enjoy!

Oskar

Looks great Oskar (as always!)

Brilliant Oskar.So just incase you didn't know you solved it, it tells you so .

11 pieces?! How does THAT work?
Most of the time I can immedeately see how a certain puzzle turns, but with 11 pieces, can it turn in every direction from the solved position? Does it act very bandaged(with lots of blockings)? And what makes you say no human could ever solve it?
EDIT: I forgot to mention, it's another Oskar-masterpiece

There are two ways of thinking about this puzzle. One of them is that there are 11 pieces, with each edge pointing to one of the two farthest edges. The other way is to think of it as being a bandaged 22-piece dihedral, with the different pieces being 1, 2, or 3 units wide, and the outside shape modded to make them all consistent external widths.

It should also be mentioned that this is probably the most difficult twisty puzzle ever built!

You present a bandged puzzle before the unbandaged one?
That is unfair!

Quick question: How do you know when it's aligned to be able to do a turn? On the turns, when you're doing a center slice twist, the pieces aren't properly aligned, so how do you know?

You can see it. When the seams match up at both ends of the center seam, you can always turn. It is an intruiging property of this concept.

Oskar

It says to contact you directly for a fully stickered and assembled version, so my question is how much would it cost and are you open to a trade.Although I don't have any super rare puzzles,I have been thinking of making some less common if not completely new mods.Also why is it so expensive.Even the price to volume ratio is off on many of you puzzle.The overlap cube has nearly 3x the volume of the unscrambled, yet it costs $30 less.I still think your puzzles are great, it's just that they are too expensive(for me at least).