Extremely Puzzling - Goetz Schwandtner's Puzzles

Puzzle Group: n-ary Puzzles

This page is the first group page created in this gallery, to contain some puzzles that are closely related and to demonstrate how they are related. The first group of puzzle may seem like a collection of completely different puzzles at first, and it includes a Japanese Karakuri box, a big burr from Australia, several metal puzzles, some elephants, little cube boxes, and several sliding puzzles, and then there is the big one with a good colleciton of switches. So what's the common properties of these all (and even more not in my rollection)? All of them have properties qualifying them as "n-ary puzzles". It started with the old Chinese Rings puzzle and the discovery that the rings can be interpreted as bits (0 or 1) and then the puzzle and its solution would resemble the Gray Code, which originates in coding theory. Later on, ternary puzzles (like the Crazy Elephant Dance) were designed lifting the puzzles from binary to ternary, with all pieces having three states (0, 1, or 2). More and more puzzles came and were determined to be n-ary, with the record holder so far being the 7-ary "Kugellager 7". Starting with the original Kugellager I collected some information on n-ary puzzles and integrated them into my article about the Kugellager. It contains some information on puzzles I do not have and you can download it here: Kugellager.pdf. Enjoy reading!