butchwax

Outside her school, Yamin bought several little puzzles from a street vendor. Among them was one that you may have seen before, in Chinese, 孔明锁 (kong ming suo), maybe meaning “Kong Ming Lock”.

The completed puzzle:

And disassembled:

These puzzles are actually very famous in China. It seems that everyone knows that they were invented some time around the beginning of the 3rd C. by Zhuge Liang, a high official during China’s Three Kingdoms period, and the Chinese all know his character in the Chinese classic novel, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. He has the reputation of being very smart and well-educated, and that he invented this puzzle is evidence of that.

After Yamin brought this home, I solved it within the first 5 minutes. However, that turned out to be beginner’s luck, because later, I was not only unable to solve it a second time, but I actually proved that it couldn’t be done. Ahem.

So, I finally decided to solve the problem by writing a python program to try every single combination of the blocks. It took me a couple of hours to write, but only 3 seconds to run, and the computer actually found two unique solutions! Very gratifying.

Yamin thinks I cheated by writing the computer program. However, I don’t think so. Because I wrote the program, it means I have demonstrated that I know a method to find both solutions. Whether the actual work to find the solution, using this method, was performed by me or by the computer doesn’t really matter. My example to her was, if you use an electric drill to make a hole, do you say that you made the hole, or do you say the drill made the hole? The code defines a simple, dumb procedure to methodically try every combination of each piece in each position, nothing magic, the computer isn’t doing any intelligent thinking for me. Perhaps I shouldn’t get any more credit than I should get for the first time I solved the puzzle, when I blindly stumbled on a solution. However, I definitely give myself credit!

This entry was posted on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 1:46 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.