I have met Tomas on a couple of occasions during the past IPPs. Not only did I buy the Ring Bottle Puzzle but also a couple of other bottle puzzles. One of the latter had already shown some signs of mould inside! And you can tell by the marks and stains inside the Ring Bottle that I have not touched it for a long time!

The Ring Bottle is the design of Wil Strijbos, who also entered the puzzle for the IPP21 Puzzle Design Competition in 2001. The competition version featured a red plastic rod and balls. It is also not your typical looking bottle in that the body is slightly curved like a hip flask. Not sure whether the shape was intended to have anything to do with the puzzle or merely co-incidence. Dimensionally it is about 16.5cm tall (including the stick) and about 8.7cm wide.

IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT

Bottle puzzles like the Ring Bottle are usually classified as “impossible objects”, meaning that it looks physically impossible to solve. The majority of impossible objects are  of course possible to solve. Some of the impossible puzzles that I have played with include Smiley In A Bottle, Cast Vortex Puzzle In A Bottle, Puzzle Jam, and truly impossible looking stuff like 4 Street Elbows and of course Wil’s Coke Bottle series.

Impossible To Solve?

At first glance it looks difficult to solve. The Ring Bottle Puzzle is like a hybrid between a bottle puzzle and a disentanglement puzzle. The goal here is not to remove the stick or the balls attached to the string. Rather the puzzler is required to remove only the metal ring that is resting on the larger of the two wooden balls. The ring appears to be trapped by the larger ball  and the stick with no chance of release. Like most bottle puzzles, some form of dexterity is required in the solve.

For such puzzles, some initial thinking is required prior to play. Otherwise you just end up wasting a lot of time and effort and no solution. I would imagine that puzzlers who are experienced with entanglement or string puzzles would more or less figure out quite quickly how to untangle the ring. While it may look impossible, it does not defy physics and there is a solution. It took me a while and bit of trying this and that before I managed to the ring off the large ball and then out of the bottle,

The challenge doesn’t end here. The trick is also to be able to get the ring back to its original position. Now this second task was for me far more difficult as I had to wreck my brain to figure out the reverse steps. I must have at least tried 4-5 times before finally hitting upon the right strategy and then the solution. Now one thing that still puzzles me; how to get the two balls in and out of the bottle??

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The puzzle in question is The Melting Tile, which also happens to have been the IPP37 Exchange Puzzle of puzzle/puzzle books collector Yee Dian Lee of Malaysia. I would imagine most puzzlers would have heard of the famous Melting Block puzzle designed by Tom O’Beirne, which has seen different variants made by different puzzle craftsmen over the years. The Melting Block is a 3D packing puzzle that requires a puzzler to fit a ninth block into a box which already contains 8 other block pieces (of varying shapes) with no internal spaces/voids. Sounds impossible right? Yes and No. Bill Cutler describes it as such:

The Melting Block is more of a paradox then a puzzle. The eight pieces fit together easily to form a rectangular block 57 x 87 x 132. This fits into the box with a little room all around, but looks to the casual observer to fill up the box completely. When the ninth piece is added to the group, the pieces can be rearranged to make a 58 x 88 x 133 rectangular solid. (This second construction is a little more difficult). This is a great puzzle to show to “non-puzzle people” and is one of my favorites.

Goh Pit Khiam applied this same principle and came up instead with a 2D version the goal is to remove 7 pieces that fills a tray completely, rearrange them and fit in an 8th red piece…and completely fill up the tray again…again seemingly impossible. Quite a design feat I might add, and burr tools is not something you can use here for this sort of design.

When Oscar came to Singapore and we had an informal second Singapore Puzzle Party, Oscar played with The Melting Tile and managed to solve it over dinner. I decided to give my copy of this Exchange Puzzle a try, but (fortunately or unfortunately) with the benefit of knowing the hint for solving such a puzzle…which Oscar alluded to during his solve.

With a hint or not, this is one of those puzzles which can be solved with some persistence. Given the fact that it has only 7+1 red piece to fit into a squarish tray, it is not such an impossible task as one would imagine. Both solving and un-solving and placing the pieces back to where they belong doesprovide some degree of challenge, easy for some, difficult for others.  But notwithstanding, a nice puzzle to confound non-puzzlers and even puzzlers alike. I love it when people give that look of bewilderment on their faces when they see the small red piece fit inside the tray with the rest…”gosh, how’s that possible?”

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