Mirrorkal Escher

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Pio2001
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Mirrorkal Escher

Post by Pio2001 » July 29th, 2012, 11:26 pm

Mirrorkal.jpg
Mirrorkal.jpg (144.35 KiB) Viewed 7628 times
Estimated solving time
Beginners : 30 minutes per challenge
Casual puzzlists : 10-15 minutes per challenge
Expert puzzlists : 5-10 minutes per challenge

My rating : 3/5

The positive : original, clever and enjoyable puzzle
The negative : the puzzle is not very beautiful. The pictures are a bit misaligned, and doesn't look good through the multiple reflections, except maybe the fish and bird one shown in the photographs.

Mirrorkal Escher is an original puzzle that consists in 9 cubes with a mirror inside. The mirror is tilted diagonally, so that when we look into the cube from the top, we can see the side of the next cube reflected.
Mirrorkal2.jpg
Mirrorkal2.jpg (96.62 KiB) Viewed 7628 times
The cubes, as well as the box, contain parts of 5 famous pictures by the artist M.C.Escher. The goal is to rebuild them.

The idea behind this puzzle is very clever. Finding the right part of a picture doesn't help to know where the cube must be placed, because it can actually fit in any of the adjacent positions. And if you want to try one, using a mirror to make it visible might be a mistake if the cube containing the mirror is not meant to go in this place.

You have to find a tactic in order to get a starting point, and from there to find the next cubes to be used. It is very enjoyable.

The negative points are that the pictures are not very well centered on the sides of the cubes, which means that once the cubes are well placed, the whole picture looks a bit misaligned.
Escher's pictures are not very well rendered because they lay inside a dark box, covered by the cubes (the light goes through two windows before reaching the pictures, and we then look through them again), and the separations between the 9 parts are quite thick.
Actually, the fish and bird picture shown above is the only one of the 5 that looks more or less correct. The 4 other ones suffer from the separations and the misalignment, and can't really be enjoyed for themselves.

I give it 3/5 because it is fun to play with. Escher himself would certainly have liked the idea.

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