Sliding puzzle
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A sliding puzzle, sliding block puzzle, or sliding tile puzzle is a combination puzzle that challenges a player to slide (frequently flat) pieces along certain routes (usually on a board) to establish a certain end-configuration. The pieces to be moved may consist of simple shapes, or they may be imprinted with colours, patterns, sections of a larger picture (like a jigsaw puzzle), numbers, or letters.
Sliding puzzles are essentially two-dimensional in nature, even if the sliding is facilitated by mechanically interlinked pieces (like partially encaged marbles) or three-dimensional tokens. In manufactured wood and plastic products, the linking and encaging is often achieved in combination, through
Unlike
The oldest type of sliding puzzle is the
The fifteen puzzle has been computerized (as puzzle video games) and examples are available to play for free on-line from many Web pages. It is a descendant of the jigsaw puzzle in that its point is to form a picture on-screen. The last square of the puzzle is then displayed automatically once the other pieces have been lined up.
Group theory
As a famous example of the sliding puzzle, it can be proved that the
Gallery
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A solved 15-puzzle
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A solved 15-puzzle with letters forming a sentence
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A solved 15-puzzle with an image
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A 7x7 sliding puzzle. The goal is for each image to appear only once horizontally, vertically, and diagonally. There is more than one solution to this puzzle.
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A 3x3 sliding puzzle featuring a comic book character
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An example of the Klotski puzzle
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An unsolvable puzzle due to the pieces not being in an even permutation
Examples of sliding puzzles
- Fifteen puzzle
- Klotski
- Minus Cube
- Rush Hour
- Sokoban
- Rubik's Slide
See also
- Ro (video game) – A rotational variation
- Rubik's Cube
References
- ^ http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~storer/JimPuzzles/SLIDE/CornellCrossword/KeithArticle2011.pdf[bare URL PDF]
- ^ Beeler, Robert. "The Fifteen Puzzle: A Motivating Example for the Alternating Group" (PDF). faculty.etsu.edu/. East Tennessee State University. Retrieved 2020-12-26.
- Sliding Piece Puzzles (by ISBN 0-19-853204-0) is said to be the definitive volume on this type of puzzle.
- Winning Ways (by Elwyn Ralph Berlekamp et al., 1982, Academic Press)
- The 15 Puzzle (by Jerry Slocum & Dic Sonneveld, 2006, Slocum Puzzle Foundation)
- US Patent 4872682 - sliding puzzle wrapped on Rubik's Cube