Hi Twisty Puzzles fans,

Gear Planet was suggested by Ferdinand Lammertink. Ferdinand is best know as the inventor of several Thinkfun puzzles, including Backspin and Port-to-Port and recently Perilous Pipes by Popular Playthings.

Gear Planet has 11 tiles. There is a gearing&sliding mechanism for scrambling the tiles. The object is to get them all back in order. Experts may recognize some similarity between the gearing of four tiles, and the up-and-down mechanism of Port-to-Port.

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

Enjoy!

Oskar

What an excellent design! I find it incredibly aesthetically pleasing as well. Good colour choices!

Interesting idea! This puzzle is like Port-to-Port but 3D!

Hi Oskar,

can you post an image showing the opposite side (with 5 and 7 visible; after a small movement) of this beautiful puzzle?
There is no specific mathematical group which ist represented by this puzzle like it was for Number Planet.

Andreas

Why an odd number of tiles?

I might like to try a smaller, less difficult version, perhaps with 7 tiles.

I literally said to the screen.. oh my god that is so cooool!

Great puzzle, I love it!

I suppose it must be an odd number, with that one tile in the middle of the 2 tiles on the gears on one side off the puzzle.
Great puzzle, hope it will be mass produced, I can't afford the Shapeways version.

Nice!!! Very original while at the same time it looks SO familiar. I swear I've seen a puzzle with numbered tiles nearly idential to this but its probably the Chromosix Number Ball that I'm thinking of.
Surely this puzzle IS another group theory problem. So it must be a specific mathematical group... isn't it? Its just not the same group as Number Planet. Oh and why does Number Planet have two entries in the museum? Am I missing something?

http://www.twistypuzzles.com/cgi-bin/puzzle.cgi?pkey=1519
and
http://www.twistypuzzles.com/cgi-bin/puzzle.cgi?pkey=3001

Carl

Looking at the first picture above... you see all the numbers in order with "up" being toward the green part. I'm curious, is the state where all the numbers are in order but "up" is now toward the blue part reachable from the above starting position? If so, what is the minimum number of moves needed to get from one of these states to the other?

Carl

I forgot to include the question mark.
I wanted to know whether Oskar had a specific group in mind. Stupid me.

You missed nothing. That doubled entry is just one of the mistakes I do once in a while.
Any hint towards mistakes like this is very much appreciated.

Andreas

Every 2-swap flips the orientation of four numbers, and as 11 isn't divisible by 4 you can't get in that state.

Nice proof. Thanks.

Carl

For the extra mechanism, is it that you can turn both of the black circular sections in tandem, due to an internal bevel gear?

Solving this one isn't all that hard. If you imagine the positions reordered to 1 5 9 2 6 10 3 7 11 4 8 then each move flips two pairs of adjacent pieces, and it's much clearer what's going on.

The first two times I watched the video I did so without sound so I wondered where this talk of an "extra mechanism" was coming from. Now that I've heard it with sound I'm quite curious what he's talking about as well. He does state in the video "so this puzzle is quite difficult because you only have those 2 motions, the rotation about the sphere, and then the geared motion." So I'm thinking the extra mechanism isn't related to the solving of the numbered tile puzzle.

Hmmm... having said that I thought I'd take a peak inside using the info that has already been provided and see if I could see anything. I now think you are correct. It appears there are TWO types of geared motion. Take a peak at this:


One Dalek looks over his fallen comrade?

Carl