Some months ago we announced here the next issue of the Dutch Cube Day.

It will be held the coming weekend on Sunday October 10th in Groningen in (the northern part of) The Netherlands.

Those who are member of the NKC (the Dutch Cubist Club) have received invitations.
For those who would like to attend but did not register yet (being a member of NKC or not), please contact me.

We expect about 100 people. Entrance fee is Euro 12.50 (which includes coffee, tea + small lunch).
Apart from the usual swapping, buying/selling and showing of puzzles (both Rubik's type as well as non-Rubik's type) there will be a speedcontest as well as 3 lectures.

Geert Hellings
The Netherlands.

Hello Geert,
I finally decided to make the trip and attend this year's Cube Day. How can I register?

Also, would you know of a good place where to stay in Groningen?

Thanks!
Jorge

P.S. Anybody else from this forum planning to attend?

Hello Jorge,

That is very interesting news!
You have been registered in the meantime.
Regarding some other details, I just sent you a separate e-mail to your msn e-mail address.
Looking forward to seeing you sunday!!

Geert

Hello Jorge,

The e-mail I was referring to in my previous message generated an error message.
Please send your correct e-mail address to my e-mail account listed here and I will resent the details to you.

Kind regards,

Geert

Hi Jorge,

Yes, we will be there too for the Dutch Open 2004 speedcubing competition.
The people registered for the competition are from Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and United Kingdom.

We will arrive on saturday and stay in the Friesland Hotel:
http://www.hotelfriesland.nl/nederlands/prijzen.htm

If you are interested in meeting us on saturday, then please send me an e-mail at ron@speedcubing.com.

Looking forward to meeting you.

Have fun,

Ron
http://www.speedcubing.com

Geert / Ron,

Thanks for your replies and kind advice.

I look forward to meeting you this weekend!

Regards,
Jorge

Anyone have any news to share about the Dutch Cube Day??? I look forward to hearing all about it. Was Tony Fisher in attendance this year??

Hi all,

I send out to you a first information from DCD. I believe that you will be pleased all like me. On DCD I saw and I have had in my hands firstly in my life ( maybe also last time ) the puzzle called GAME JUGO or JUGO FLOWER. Above all I must say puzzle wasn't for sale !!! Puzzle was made 7 samples only (!!! ) how said me a owner. I could try a solution a functionality. It work very nice and lightly. Puzzle is enough heavy. You can turn with one petal marked with small white triangle. Together are turned next three petals with triangles. Triangles are placed non balanced after periphery. Next possibility is turning of all petals together around.
Next pictures from DCD and Speedcubing competition will be within a few days.

I forgot still. Tony Fisher wasn't in attendance this year. Maybe next.

At first I had to thank Geert Hellings for the invitation to the DCD 2004. It was my second attendance and once again a big success. Very nice to meet all the other puzzle collectors and speedcubers.

Of course you could find the newest puzzles Brain Twist and Zylla, but also many other. Jaap showed his prototype of the Jackpot.

Some nice pictures of the event could be seen here:
http://www.speedcubing.com/events/dcd2004

A big pleasure for me was also Jaap's Puzzle Patent CD.
He has written an excellent patent viewer in Java Script/Java which shows about 700 different puzzle patents (mainly twisty puzzles) and 400 equivalent patents in different languages. All patents are on the CD in pdf format (one file per patent). His viewer also shows overviews with pictures, so it is easy to find a specific puzzle. His viewer database includes besides the typical fields (patent number, date filed, inventor), the commercial names respective short description names. You could define which data fields you want to see and your favorite sort order. It's really fantastic and nearly perfect. I could highly recommend this CD. You'll see many puzzle ideas never seen before. If all of this puzzles were produced, we would all be poor

Take a look at this great work:

So, Jaap. Care to tell us how to get a copy of your CD?...

_pink

Yea I'd love to have a copy of your CD to. BADLY!!! Does it run on IBM compatible or does it run on a Apple computer? Would you happen to know the requirements to run the program?

Jaap is a java coder. I'd assume it's cross platform if you have the java runtime engine installed on your machine.

Yep. This program needs a browser capable of handling frames, javascript,
and Java 1.2. To see the pdfs the acrobat viewer must also be installed.

Jaap recommends Mozilla Firefox, with Sun's Java VM. But browser Internet Explorer even works.

I tested the cd also within Knoppix, a debian-based linux, which could be completely loaded from cd. The patent viewer works fine within the pre-installed Mozilla 1.65.

For those interested in my patent cd, see the Patent CD sale thread in the marketplace section.

I too had a wonderful time at the Cube Day. As usual I bought much more stuff than I thought I would - I was only counting on getting the Braintwist the Pakovalec, and a Cohan Circle, but I got a couple of other puzzles which may or may not end up on my page one day.

I also made pictures of Wil Strijbos' beautiful Jugo Flower puzzle. I am green with envy of course. Anyway, it is an easy puzzle to solve (same techniques as Lights Out), and I will add it to my page (with playable script version) despite the fact that I will probably never own one.

Jaap, is the Jugo flower basically the same mechanism as the gerdig UFO only simplified and with which petals have the gearing changed? If so, I think it's actually quite a good puzzle - a clever, simple, robust mechanism, and a difficulty level which is about what most people can handle.

I've watched a bunch of non-enthusiasts play with my puzzle collection lately, and it seems all that most people can handle is the 15 puzzle, the rainbow cube, and the netblock UFO. The rubik's cube at least is a counterexample to the theory that the general public is only interested in 'easy' puzzles.

Jaap, great work on the Patents CD!

Yes it is. This turns it into a kind of mechanical Lights Out puzzle.

When Will Strijbos was showing the puzzle around on the evening before the cube day, I ermarked that it was a bit of a shame that it was not possible to get to the state with all petals reversed. He didn't believe it, and was sure he had had it in that position before. I explained why (the number of reversed petals always remains an even number), but he remained dubious. It is strange how memory plays tricks on people. The next day he'd thought about it a bit more and told me he was now also convinced it was impossible.

I have since worked out that of the 2^15 seemingly possible states, only 2^12 are achievable. The quiet patterns are the 2^3 that have 5-fold symmetry.



It is a good puzzle, but while the internal mechanism is very robust, I don't think the petals were. They are attached with pins that have too small a cross-section, and as they are so long, they will probably break off easily.



I think it is just because it does not look so difficult - the cube shape is so familiar, and maybe the 3x3 sides even bring Tic Tac Toe to mind subconsciously.

Having some unreachable positions is actually good, since it's bad to have a sequence which just flips over a single piece. What's the arrangement of pieces which get flipped? An answer of the form XOXOOXXO is preferred

I suspect that there's a better arrangement with 12 instead of 15 petals, since that has more subgroups. This is why hockey puck puzzles have 12 pieces too.



That should be fixable mechanically. The base could have tubes coming out of it which grip the base of the petals, and the petals could be made shorter.



It might be because starting it is fairly easy. Most people can get one face of the cube the right color, although typically it's just the face and not the first layer. Hockey puck is another puzzle which people like playing with even though they can't solve it, probably because the first few pieces are trivial, and the first half is straightforward.

The Jugo pattern is:
XooXoooXooXoooo
You can see the little white triangle marks in the centre on the first picture

Jaap

For all,
I placed on my website some next information from Dutch Cube Day 2004.

Oh, I envy you sooo much!
I will definitely make sure I'll be there next year. German or Dutch cube day or both!
Vadim

That's a pretty good pattern. It suffers from being two sets of things exactly three apart though, which allows for a very straightforward solution. First you solve every third petal. Then you solve every third petal of the set you were just flipping. For the third set, you make use of the sequence which flips exactly to pieces, which can be done by flipping four, then flipping the second set of three apart using a flip offset by seven so its first set of three meshes with the first one's second set of three. Then cancel out the newly created set of three apart, and cancel out the one that makes, and keep doing this until the new set of three apart cancels out one of the to in the first flip's first set of three apart. The result is a flip of two pieces offset by 6 spots.

A good one for 12 petals is XooXoooXoooo. I like 12 because most of the subsets which only flip 2 petals can't be used to solve the whole puzzle. I've figured out a reasonable solution for this, but it involved actually doing row reduction rather than just eyeballing the sequence for a few minutes. It also has the property that all positions in it are reachable, which allows for a simplistic solution based on a set of flips which only flips a single spot, although finding that set is considerably harder than working out the entire solution to the 15 spot version.

That is pretty much what I figured out too. There is of course also a sequence that flips two petals that are three apart, which you can use to solve the last set of 5 evenly spaced petals. I think that sequence uses 6 moves or so.